Healthy Citizens Can Only Make A Wealthy Economy
For years what one felt that countries ‘should have’, post-Covid this has changed to ‘must have’. Yes, we are talking about healthcare infrastructure. While all countries are working hard to cope with their existing healthcare capacity, even developed countries appear to be falling short and the global gap in healthcare has been exposed.
India, home to over 1.3 billion people, has a fragmented healthcare system with an inadequate public health infrastructure and a large and growing private sector. While the good part is the focus is in the right place but the worry is the healthcare network and the demographic reach versus availability is not proportionate. About 2.5 beds per 1,000 population has been generally the international norm, whereas in India it has been less than one bed per 1,000 population.
Even before the Covid pandemic broke, WHO in one of its analysis reports has given an estimated projection that in the next 10 years, India’s disease treatment expenditure is likely to touch USD 3.5 trillion, considering the country, its population, lifestyle, age, disease spread, etc.
The budget 2022 therefore is not just a budget for provisioning, but it should be a budget for future planning and preparedness. India will need to address the decades of underinvestment in public health system and social health, which may leave it struggling at this time of crisis. This is an opportunity for India to strengthen its social health for advancement of public health like never before and emerge as a true global leader.
Sensing the need, the Modi government has taken the steps towards addressing the country’s healthcare need by launching the Rs.64,000 crore Prime Minister Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PMABHIM) to fill critical gaps in public health infrastructure, for reaching 730 districts & 3,000 blocks in the next five years. While the mission is worth an applause, but what we need is deadline based implementation and not a Centre versus State show and that implementation can happen only with the proper budgetary allocations.
There are many things under the healthcare space which need to be addressed and the expectations are huge from our budget 2022, but we should definitely focus on certain crucial ones to begin with.
1. We have to ensure that healthcare workers on whose shoulders the future will rest have the best skillset. There is a need to improve the infrastructure and skilled manpower in the background of the lessons learnt from the pandemic, hence this budget should provide and promote the same.
2. India has around 9.26 lakh doctors for an entire nation of 1.3 billion and less than 20,000 of these 9.26 lakh doctors are trained in pulmonology, anaesthesiology, critical care and emergency medicine — the key departments require respiratory care and active life-saving intervention. The government should initiate standardized training in various domains, such as emergency medicine, critical care, pulmonology, case management, infection control, safe testing and isolation protocols. This budget should provide for medical colleges across the length & breadth of the country imparting speciality courses.
3. Since a large proportion of the healthcare capacity lies in the private sector, public-private partnership is a critical component of the response to Covid-19 in India, there is a need to develop public-private partnership preparedness plans at the district level to rapidly develop the infrastructure and the budget should provision for scaling and upgrading public hospitals in partnership with private.
4. The focus on improving healthcare infrastructure in tier-2 and 3 cities especially in India is the need of the hour in the background of the pandemic and post pandemic period. District level planning and provisioning needs to be done to strengthen the country’s overall infrastructure and then take it to the block level.
5. There is a need to push digitization in the healthcare space like tele health and provide funds and incentives for the same.
6. There is a need for the government to incentivise hospitals with the help of insurance mechanisms to promote screening and preventive care and reduce out of pocket expenditure for the common person.
7. Tax holidays can be given in specific sectors and focus should be on medical devices.
8. Mental health care, primary care has gaps in the context of the pandemic and treatment facilities should be expanded.
9. Immense support is needed to build the biomedical research system and innovation, for example, what we saw in vaccines.
10. There is a need to reduce GST across products & services in healthcare to spur consumer spending. The relaxation will eventually get covered through volume and lead to more investments.
Allocating a sufficient budget for the healthcare sector should not be an option but it should be mandatory, more so, looking at the future and given that this is not a one-time occurrence, there is a pressing need to develop a long term approach for implementing a system to deal with future needs. Healthy citizens can only make a wealthy economy.
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