economy’

When medicine can heal—but the market decides who is allowed to recover

By Prof. MarkAnthony Nze

The Cure Economy

The cure is always announced with ceremony.
A press release. A stock surge. A promise framed as a breakthrough. The language is triumphant, almost moral: historic, life-saving, transformational. Yet beneath the celebration lies a quieter, unresolved question—one that modern medicine rarely confronts honestly: what happens when curing disease threatens the business of treating it?

In today’s health system, a cure is no longer just a scientific achievement. It is an economic event. It must justify its price, defend …

When vulnerability is repackaged as opportunity in global health

By Prof. MarkAnthony Nze

The experiment did not begin with a molecule or a hypothesis.
 It began with absence.

Absence of clinics with diagnostic equipment. Absence of hospitals stocked with essential medicines. Absence of systems capable of offering care without conditions. In these places, illness is not merely biological; it is logistical and financial. Care does not arrive as one option among many. It arrives as the only door left open.

That door is often labeled research.

According to the World Health Organization’s Global Health Expenditure Database (2023), global health …

The Price of Being Human

When health becomes currency, survival becomes conditional.

By Prof. MarkAnthony Nze

When Care Stopped Being a Moral Guarantee

There was a time when illness, though feared, did not immediately translate into financial dread. Health systems were imperfect, uneven, and often unjust—but the act of seeking care was not, in itself, an economic negotiation. That moral baseline has eroded.

Today, the experience of illness is inseparable from cost calculations. Before diagnosis comes coverage verification. Before treatment comes authorization. Before healing comes an invoice. The modern health system no longer asks first what does this patient need?…