Twelve-year-old Alonso Arroyo is worried about his friend Dario.
Doctors in Spain (IBEX), where the government is cutting health spending while paying 23.5 billion euros ($29 billion) to bail out its third-largest bank, stopped Dario’s prescription of the 2,000-euro a month growth hormone both boys need to stop their bodies degenerating because of a genetic condition. Alonso doesn’t know his treatment was pulled too.
“We’ve developed capitalism to the point where it’s eating us,” said his father, Jose Andres Arroyo, who’s been unemployed since his trucking firm in Madrid folded three years ago. “How did we do this? We’ve trashed the European welfare state.”
The two Spanish boys, who also have learning disabilities because their illness slowed down brain development, have never heard of government bonds. They don’t know that their country’s banks plowed 300 billion euros into property developments, many of which are empty, or that Greek politicians lied about their debt. With the European financial crisis now in its third year, spending considered sacred in the good times is becoming expendable as governments weigh the needs of their most vulnerable against the threat of losing access to debt markets.
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