While scientific knowledge and healthcare products and services have advanced exponentially over the past generation, millions in India still die from preventable and curable disease due to lack of access to basic medicines and medical services, according to a white paper.
Titled ‘The Indian Health Sector - providing choice, competition, efficiency and finance’, the white paper authored by Bibek Debroy, Centre for Policy Research, was released here today.
Infectious diseases continue to rise in rural areas and non-communicable or chronic diseases are on an alarming rise in urban areas, it pointed out.
Since 1947, there have been 21 committees and commissions that have something to do with health. India’s performances in healthcare is sub-par, even in comparison with developing countries.
Apart from disparities across India's regions, the country has fallen short of the goals set out in the Eleventh Five Year Plans as well as the Millennium Development Goals.
In the 1960s, the emphasis shifted to public funding and public provisioning. As a result, an ambience of inefficiency and stagnation pervaded the health sector. Although choice and competition once again came with liberalisation in July 1991, the public sector still lacks efficiency, functioning in a perfunctory manner.
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With healthcare reforms not having been implemented, healthcare has stagnated for decades. The white paper highlighted the need to focus on the role of the health system within the broader context of the economic, social and educational determinants of health.
It mentions a slew of measures - delivery and infrastructure issues, skills upgradation, addressing the entire spectrum of disease burden, public-private partnerships and other efficient models, financing and insurance - required to overhaul Indian healthcare.