For the last ten months, Ebola has been ravaging some of the world’s poorest countries, such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The structural issues exacerbating the Ebola crisis have been mostly glossed over by the media. In order to deal with the current Ebola crisis, the socioeconomic and political factors contributing to the outbreak must be understood and addressed properly.

It is naïve at best, disingenuous at worst to expect an extremely poor country such as Liberia to handle an outbreak literally unprecedented in its severity. Even before the outbreak, the affected countries were barely able to maintain their hospitals. The Ebola crisis has caused “normal” healthcare operations in affected areas to break down completely. The virus is most prevalent in rural areas with few clinics, which are overwhelmed with many more potential patients than they can treat. Meanwhile, people are still giving birth, dying of natural causes, and suffering any number of ailments which might require them to go to a hospital—if, that is, their local hospital has not closed down, if they can even get in the door, if they are not rejected. Underequipped and overwhelmed, the local healthcare providers simply cannot cope.

The rich countries can, should, and to some extent is already trying to help. Unfortunately, the same rich countries most capable of handling Ebola are largely responsible for West African healthcare’s lack of capacity in the first place.

Poor healthcare is exacerbated by international donors’ ideological unwillingness to fund African governments’ ministries of health in favor of private investment. At international institutions like the World Bank, the development-aid consensus is that the “efficient” private sector should do most development work, including healthcare development, as opposed to “inefficient” governments.

The same “efficiency” logic is applied to the international institutions themselves, even the World Health Organization, which was established specifically to deal with large-scale public health crises. According to a recent article in the New York Times, prior to the recent outbreak, the WHO eliminated and/or massively reduced its departments involved in rare diseases like Ebola in favor of easier-to-fund diseases like Ebola, all in the name of balancing its budget. Economic “efficiency” took precedence over efficient care.

The same misplaced priorities dominate Big Pharma; pharmaceutical companies are simply not interested in funding research for a cure. Research into potential cures for Ebola—ZMapp, VSV, and BCX4430—are almost wholly funded by grants from the U.S. and Canadian governments. The science writer Leigh Philips wrote recently, not only is the funding situation “…grotesquely immoral or unjust [but] the production of a potential cornucopia of new goods and services that could otherwise benefit our species and expand the realm of human freedom are blocked due to the free market’s lethargy and paucity of ambition.” He’s right.

The institutions most responsible for stopping Ebola are infected by an ideology of cost-cutting and stinginess, namely neoliberalism. Until this is understood, the world’s response to Ebola will not suffice—and the next epidemic will be just as bad.