-The Times of India NEW DELHI: India currently spends a little over 1% of GDP on health, far below Singapore which has the lowest public spend on health at 2.2% of GDP among countries with significant Universal Health Coverage (UHC) service, according latest National Health Profile (NHP) data. India's per capita public expenditure on health increased from Rs 621 in 2009-10 to Rs 1,112 (around $16 at current exchange rate) in 2015-16....

-Livemint.com Farmers continue to be vulnerable to frequent episodes of losses that neither the state nor the markets have been able to mitigate The dramatic long march to Mumbai involving thousands of distressed farmers on 12 March is a remarkable feat of peaceful protest against the state, given its apathy towards farmers’ distress as well as its failures in safeguarding tribal land rights. However, what is surprisingly missing in this poignant narrative...

-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...

-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...