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President Museveni recently defied ugandan MP's refusal to approve his defence budget unless more money was allocated to Health services at the expense of the Defence budget. Defence has always taken the lions share of Uganda's classified and unclassified expenditure while Health has continued to struggle with uganda performing well below the MDG target of 15% of GDP.

Uganda's health sector is a disaster shunned and avoided by all but the most desperate. Despite the governments official claims of free healthcare, Uganda's health services are anything but free. Local health centres are understaffed and under resourced while tertiary hospitals are clogged with advanced pathology that should have been picked up earlier by a functioning preventive health services and primary healthcare network. General practice is 100 % privately funded as there is no functional medicare style system with healthcare rebates while the governmebnt does not run public funded general practices.

The health care sector is bogged down by poor prioritisation, corruption and outright incompetence while politicians and government officials spend several times the health budget on the care of a handfull of well connected individuals abroad.

Health in uganda: Lies, lies and more lies is a collection of blog articles and online debates mostly with government supporters and NRM cadres about the healthcare sector in Uganda and its contradictions. It goes back many years and the debates have always been popular as many people from all walks of life are touched by and not immune to the disaster that is being hospitalised in a Uganda hospital. The most prominent victim of the NRM's mismanagement of health services was Mayombo a high ranking soldier and government official who on his deathbed was airlifted to a neighbouring country in the presidential jet in a game of futility. Another prominent beneficiary of this adhoc taxpayer funded ambulance was the presidents daughter who was airlifted to Germany for a normal delivery. This contrasts sharply with the 16 mothers who die in childbirth daily in Uganda! Uganda's political elite spent more than 350,000 USD in taxpayer funded healthcare overseas last year alone while their constituents have resorted to herbs and charlatans!

This book is a work in progress but has been released early due to popular demand. The author hopes to extend its reach offline and hopes that it will be read widely including by Ugandan politicians and health bureaucrats. it is free as in free beer and is available as a pdf for reading on computers, a mobi for kindle and as an epub for other readers, mobile phones and tablets. Future revisions will also be made available.

The author is a medical specialist who grew up in and had his early medical training in Uganda. He has practiced medicine on three continents. He also has a recent personal experience following a murder attempt two days after arriving in Uganda in July 2012. It is not known whether that incident had any relationship with his writings on social and political issues in uganda or whether it was a random event in the increasingly insecure country where numerous people continue to be murdered daily!

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