India, a country which fares very low on health indicators has one of the lowest health expenditure levels and a wholly inadequate healthcare infrastructure. Government must increase the budget allocation for health from the current 1% to at least 2.5% over the next two years. The United States spends 17.7% of its GDP on health, while India keeps company with countries such as Pakistan (3.1%), Sri Lanka (3.1%) and Bangladesh (3.6%).

We need a firmer commitment from the government this year onward on some of the long pending steps that need to be taken to improve the universal healthcare delivery system in India.  According to some recent media reports the difficulty in managing disease outbreaks, most recent of which is the ‘Swine flu’, expose the inability of our public health system to reach out to 75% of the people who desperately need help.  Access to Healthcare extends beyond the cost of medicine, to the proximity, quality and functionality of the infrastructure that supports that access. In a recent assessment of the Indian economy, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) identified India’s poor health outcomes as one of our major developmental challenges.  Indeed, today India has among the highest disease burdens in the world.

Victoria Fan, Research Fellow at Centre for Global Development, who has written extensively on India said, “India will need to experiment with different tools for reforming its healthcare system, including how the central government pays state governments and the incentives on those payments, as well as how state governments can improve the delivery of healthcare services through changing payment systems, improving regulation and accreditation of facilities, increasing autonomy in public facilities and using demand-side incentives such as cash transfers or insurance to stimulate the supply of services.”

According to media reports, the real problem is that the government has barely maintained health spending’s share in GPD terms and did not give more priority within total expenditure. Health’s share in total spending has remained the same around 4.6%.

The need of the day is to increase public spending on healthcare and collaborate with private players to meet the big healthcare challenge.  Increased (and well-allocated) healthcare budgets; the promised Universal Health Assurance; and a robust National Healthcare policy will serve to benefit patients. Any long-term solution to our challenges will require a holistic approach and a critical evaluation of our existing systems – certainly, each stakeholder will need to play a part. We look to Government to lead the way and assure you that our industry is more than willing to step forward and play our role.Air Jordan For Men