The India Healthcare system

It’s one of the most astonishing facts of the world that India has a universal healthcare system. Recently I was completely awestruck after reading an international journal of healthcare systems around the world and India was among those nations which guaranteed universal healthcare to its denizens.

Though the aforementioned thing stands theoretically true but its veracity can be easily and assertively challenged on practical terms. There are various government owned hospitals in the nations as well as public sector ones too, but still it would be an embarrassing thing to even say that India guarantees a healthcare system to its citizens. The India healthcare program started in the year 1986 on being endorsed by the government of India and was updated in the year 2002 but still even after 32 years of commencement of Indian healthcare program, we still lag behind in a very much ragged condition.

Despite of being one of the world’s biggest economies, Indian healthcare suffers major lags and glitches. Starting from the beginning, India spends only 3.9% of India’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) on health sector. This amount is lowest among the BRICS ( Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) economies. United States appreciably spends 17.2% on its healthcare and this proportion is biggest expenditure on healthcare by a single nation. Notwithstanding having a population of 1.252 billion we still spends such a meager amount on our healthcare.

The other thing is that the universal healthcare in India boasts of having government hospital providing medication and required facilities at zero or much discounted price but in actuality this belief stands quashed because the real condition through which people at the grass root level suffer in much horrifying.

First of all there are not sufficient number of hospitals to cater the needs of a world’s second largest population. According to Indian government’s statistics there are only 11613 government hospitals in the nation with total bed capacity of 5,40,000 which can be considered almost negligible as compared to 1.252 billion! According to a survey, a staggering 70% of the rural population of India is devoid of healthcare facilities. AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Services) country’s biggest and most advanced hospital is only available 8 locations (Delhi, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Jodhpur, Raipur, Rishikesh, Haryana) out of which till now the Delhi branch has the amenities to conduct high level and advanced operations. Due to such low availability of number of beds in hospitals throughout the nation, most of the people die owning to the delay in getting treatment. One more grave issue is the quality of services being given in the government hospitals. The doctors in government hospitals have always been alleged of reluctance to do treatment while some  hospitals even don’t provide medication to the patients and due to this thing too many patients have died. If we glance upon previous statistics then the government hospital facilities have been most horrible to poor pregnant women. The women are not given complete care and upright treatment and hence a lot of children die even before they are born in government hospitals. A supreme court judge once even quoted “it better to give birth to a baby in a train’s toilet rather than in a government hospital in India”.

Such lapses in the overall healthcare system has propelled to the domination of Indian healthcare completely by the private sector. The private sector hospitals, through huge investment, have been able to reach various places in India and various specialized treatments are also available in these private sector hospitals only. The hospitals provide much better facilities and amenities than public sector hospitals but the cost for treatment is very much high and almost unimaginable for poor citizens of the country and hence a rich-poor divide has also been constructed in this facet too and most important due to such popularity of the private sector hospitals, many doctors have also migrated from public to private sector ones because of huge salary incentives leaving the public sector hospitals with a humongous dearth of specialists around the nation.

Talking about the health insurance, today only 5% people in the nation are having a health insurance, the rest 95% remain uninsured. And obviously these 95% people are the poor or middle class people of the nation who either don’t want to buy a health insurance or don’t have enough money to buy one. The government too has not shown any interest in this field and hence no proper health care system has ever been evolved, leaving a nation of 1.252 billion people completely uninsured of health.

Health is a pretty cardinal issue and we can never make a compromise on it. Various nations today are spending so much on their healthcare systems but India has always overlooked and snubbed the matter. Therefore today we need to do something about it or else we will end up failing miserably.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI