-The Indian Express Budget’s bias toward privately-delivered care undermines universal health coverage Until about four decades ago, specialist healthcare (secondary and tertiary care) was largely a province of public hospitals, and the private sector largely kept itself to the provision of generalist healthcare. This underwent a transformation with the rise of the advanced medical interventions comprising tertiary-care medicine like organ transplantation and open heart surgery. Given these highly-profitable medical advances, the private...

-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...

-The Hindu New unit maps volume of chatter, its nature, user location As Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley stood up on Thursday to deliver the Budget speech this year, a real-time monitoring of public online conversations around the word “Budget” was being carried out by a small unit set up by Minister Smriti Irani in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. The longer than usual budget speech spawned many talking points and reactions, much...

-Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) Union Budget 2018-19 is the fifth and the final full-year budget of the current ruling dispensation. The major plank on which this government was elected in 2014 with an exceptional mandate were issues of development related to reducing corruption, generating meaningful employment opportunities, tackling inflation (especially food inflation, an issue plaguing the economy at that point of time), reducing inequality, and pushing the economy...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Investors may be losing sleep over the re-entry of long-term capital gains tax on equities, but analysts feel that the worrylines are actually running deeper than you realise. The mega ambitious healthcare scheme announced in the Union Budget on Thursday is one such point of concern -- which aims to benefit 10 crore poor families for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation. Sceptics are having a field day,...