Health is wealth

According to Times of India News: 

In India, high cost medical treatment and government’s unsupportive action towards health care are pushing 55 million people below poverty line. India spends just 1.2 % of GDP for its health budget. Singapore is making expenses on its health budget 2.2% of GDP, which is the lowest among all countries in the globe. However, India’s outlay on the health is even below Singapore’s most disheartening fact. Most of the People in India pay the high cost of treatments, drugs, etc., from out of their own pocket.

Recently, despite the government of India in a tom manner announces and implements Ayushman Bharat, healthcare scheme, in an AIIMS occasion, most of the public health experts and doctors of AIIMSexpressed that this insurance scheme is  mere an official route to handing over public money to the private sector.

This scheme has also other negative features like not backing outpatient care expenses, which swallows the equal amount of cost as incurred for inpatient treatment, as well.

Presently, the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence — the health intelligence wing of the Directorate General of Health Services under the Health Ministry divulged National Health Profile, 2018, released regularly after 2005.

It is a collection of information on the demographic, socio-economic, health status, finance, infrastructure and resources in the country. It states that the present doctor- patient ratio in India is 1:11082 which is worse than the ratio suggested by WHO.

The governments (both central and state) should concentrate on enhancing its own (government) hospitals’ infrastructure like the advancement of lab facilities, modern medical technologies like scanning technologies, etc. and providing sufficient doctors as guided by WHO, by allocating sufficient fund, instead of doing all sorts of these things like announcing and executing health insurance schemes like Ayushman Bharat.

I would like to quote an instance to strengthen the above fact: – when the Kerala government has developed the facilities like infrastructure, lab facilities, etc. of its (government) hospital from 25% to 40%, in recent years, now the number people started going to government hospitals for treatments. Consequently, private hospitals are getting only the lesser number of patients.