-Down to Earth Proposed national health policy favours private sector, reluctant to increase public health expenditure The initial euphoria around the proposed national health policy seems to be fading ever since the document was placed in the public domain for comments. The draft National Health Policy, 2015, (NHP 2015) is being introduced 13 years after the last policy was drafted. The primary aim of the policy is to strengthen and prioritise the role...

-The Hindu The Draft National Health Policy 2015 fails to tackle head-on the core problem of the Indian health system: its management, administration and overall governance structure The Draft National Health Policy of 2015 released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, is a comprehensive document. So comprehensive, in fact, that it says too little by saying too much. A National Heath Policy is commonly read as a...

-The Financial Express With 66% of its population under the age of 35, India is home to the largest cohort of young people in the world-825 million. The median age of the country is just 27 years, much below 37 in the US and 46 in Japan. Numbers like these suggest that India has a competitive advantage over China and other Asian countries-a demographic dividend. But favourable demographics do not imply that...

-Economic and Political Weekly The key to improving the quality of healthcare services in India and reducing costs at the same time can be found by enacting legislation which lays down minimum standards of patient care. In the absence of such standards and the reluctance of health insurance companies to standardise either price or quality, healthcare services continue to be expensive and of doubtful quality. Developing standards of patient care by...

-Reuters   The government has ordered a cut of nearly 20% in its 2014-15 healthcare budget due to fiscal strains, putting at risk key disease control initiatives in a country whose public spending on health is already among the lowest in the world. Two health ministry officials told Reuters on Tuesday that more than 60 billion rupees, or $948 million, has been slashed from their budget allocation of around $5 billion for the...