What the article is about:
- The article talks about about the set of data on health expenditure (National Health Accounts).
Relevance:
- Paper 1: Essay.
- GS2: Issues relating to development and management of Social sectors/ services relating to health.
Analysis:
- One of the important findings of National Health Accounts expenditure is that government spending as a proportion of GDP went down to 1.28% from 1.35% in the previous year.
Expenditure of healthcare in India:
- Last year’s economic survey noted that India ranks amongst the bottom 10 countries in terms of the prioritisation given to health in government budget- both at states and centre.
- The government, moreover, has been consistently falling short of the National Health Policy’s objective of spending 2.5% of GDP on health- It currently spends about 1.9% of GDP.
Burden on people’s pockets:
- People paying for healthcare expenses out of pocket (OOPE), for instance, made up 48.2% of the total health expenditure in 2018-19, down from 48.8% the previous year.
- People spent more than government on healthcare- RS 2.87 lakh crore or 1.52 percent of the GDP.
- The NHA data shows that India has a long way to go to attain the WHO yardstick of keeping out-of-pocket health expenditure to 15-20 percent of the Country’s GDP.
The skew:
- 90% of the country’s hospitals, for instance, are privately run, and close to 70% of them are in urban area.
- NITI aayog report revealed that about 30% of the country’s population does not have financial protection for health.
- The Ayushman Bharat Programme covers 50% and another 20% opt for private insurance schemes.
- The “missing middle” is the segment that isn’t eligible for government subsidies but also not rich enough to afford private schemes.
Way ahead:
- National health Account figures should be correlated with other data for meaningful policy interventions.
