-Scroll.in To spend 2.5% of GDP on healthcare by 2025, the centre and state governments must increase healthcare allocation by 24% over the same period of time. Healthcare needs continue to cause financial hardship to people across India. The National Health Accounts 2014-’15 report reveals that more than two-thirds of total spending on health (67%) is household out-of-pocket expenditure. The report tracks how much money is spent on health and how money...

-Economic and Political Weekly Healthcare as a public good should be available free of charge at the point of service delivery. This was the case across India until a flurry of reforms from the early 1990s onwards notified user charges for various health services in public health facilities. Since then, public expenditure on healthcare has seen a decline from a high of 1.5% of gross domestic product in the mid-1980s to...

-The Times of India If what the central government spends on providing healthcare for its own employees is a measure of what decent healthcare costs, what governments (central and states put together) spend for the ordinary citizen is a paltry sixth of that amount. The recently released National Health Accounts (NHA) 2014-15 shows that the average government spend per citizen per year was just Rs 1,108, against almost Rs 6,300 per...

-The Indian Express India’s healthcare debate should go back to the 40-year-old declaration that accords centrality to the local medical worker. India’s healthcare crisis has evoked a policy debate with arguments being made in favour of and against the public and private sector. S.N. Mohanty (‘Fixing healthcare’, IE, November 11) summarises the arguments of both sides very well. He concludes that there is a need to “design the public health system around...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Most households covered by government-funded health insurance have to use personal funds to pay for hospitalisation, a study has suggested, iterating concerns about the wisdom of deploying public-funded insurance schemes to seek universal health coverage in India. The study, designed to determine how well government-funded health insurance protects households from health expenditure, has found that 66 per cent of such households who sought healthcare in public hospitals and...