-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...

-TheWire.in The making of the Union Budget has been a far too secretive and hidden exercise. Social sector expenditure and allocations related to policy announcements should be matters of open ongoing debate. On December 20, 2017, a group of 60 eminent economists sent an open letter to the finance minister stating: “We are writing to draw your attention to two urgent priorities for the forthcoming budget.” The first was to increase the central...

-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 Times of India NEW DELHI: Days after the Centre announced an ambitious Healthcare scheme to provide up to Rs 5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation, the Supreme Court on Monday reminded the government that such programme would not be effective till pollution crisis is effectively tackled first. A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta said that 13 out of 20 most polluted...

-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...