-Scroll.in Thailand spends as much of its GDP on health as India, yet it offers the entire range of healthcare services to all citizens for free. Finance Minister Arun Jailtley’s Budget speech this year and the subsequent media coverage projected insurance coverage as being almost synonymous with universal health coverage. Nothing could be further from the truth. Health insurance is only a small part of ensuring universal health coverage. Besides, to...
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From ideas to action
-The Hindu Business Line The National Health Protection Scheme is promising but sketchy The National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), which promises to provide a cover of ?5 lakh each to 10 crore households (50 crore people, or about 40 per cent of the population), marks a big step forward to make secondary and tertiary healthcare affordable to the poor. The initiative is likely to reduce “catastrophic” out-of-pocket expenses, which are estimated to...
More »Topping NITI Aayog Health Index may deprive Kerala of incentives -C Maya
-The Hindu Being at the top of the game is not always rewarding. So it would seem, going by Kerala’s story. In the first-ever Health Index initiative spearheaded by NITI Aayog, Kerala has emerged on top as far as overall performance is concerned. But in terms of incremental progress, it ranks 21 because the targets for many of the indicators by which the States are being measured were achieved by Kerala way...
More »Making health insurance work -K Srinath Reddy
-The Hindu The National Health Protection Scheme is disconnected from primary care. It also needs to be scaled up It is unusual for a health programme to become the most prominent feature of a Union Budget. The previous government missed the bus when it failed to implement the recommendations of the High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage (2011). Yet, those recommendations resonate in the Budget of 2018, with commitment to universal...
More »What the US Health Insurance Programme Can Teach India -Rama V Baru
-TheWire.in Why has India chosen the path of expanding medical insurance instead of a more comprehensive approach to health? The concern with rising inequities in access to medical care, rising out-of-pocket expenditures and unmet treatment needs have been addressed with yet another targeted medical insurance scheme for poor households. The idea of a targeted medical insurance is not new. Several southern states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka had introduced such schemes many...
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