Term "well-being"It is often interpreted as a condition of people's living standards which can be measured economically by per capita income. In fact, the measure of income per capita is often not able to explain the problem of inequality when the largest part of national income is only enjoyed by a handful of the rich and super-rich. Critics of this economic approach have pushed for the method of measuring welfare to take into account the distribution structure of people's income with the principle of justice as the most important part in the discourse of social welfare.
The discourse is at least condensed into two main schools of thought. FirstSocial welfare includes not only the fulfillment of basic needs but also all aspects of the quality of human life. Meanwhile, the second school of thought places social welfare in a limited, even narrow sense. In this school of thought, the concept of social welfare is identical as a complement (complementary). In particular, this second stream seeks to distinguish aspects of economic growth on the one hand from “social welfare” aspects on the other.
There are at least three key elements to define social welfare; firstly,, social welfare is not just economic income. Secondly,, welfare emphasizes social or general aspects as opposed to individualistic approaches. And third, welfare is a system that is integrated with other policies or does not stand alone.
However, along the way, development practices in Indonesia are still oriented towards economic growth. Equity efforts only surfaced for a moment in the early 1970s when the concept of human development began to be adopted into the Outlines of State Policy. However, this effort soon experienced a backflow in the 1990s. Public policy practices from the New Order era onwards have always distinguished economic policies and programs that refer to economic growth in general with policies and programs that are oriented towards social welfare.
Policies that are oriented towards economic growth continue to this day. Over the past decade, this has occurred due to a distorted understanding of the Indonesian Social Welfare doctrine. To straighten it out, the government needs to uphold food and energy sovereignty by releasing dependence on capital, technology, and markets.
We entitled this book “Improving Welfare: Fulfillment of Economic Rights and Universal Health”. The important point that we want to underline is that welfare is not sufficiently measured in terms of economic income, but must also be measured in terms of the fulfillment of other basic rights, including the right to health. In other words, welfare is also strongly influenced by the quality of health development. Happy reading and hopefully useful.
