Daily Archives: February 24, 2014

Top 12 Challenges Facing India in the Decades Ahead – 06 – Health Care

As per our post on poverty, health care is a substantial problem in India. Not only does India have the 9th lowest life expectancy among the 16 countries outside of sub-saharan Africa that are poorer than it is, but is also has the 10th lowest infant and under-5 mortality rates and the second worst proportion of children under 5 who are undernourished! Then, as per our last post on education and opportunity, at leaset 93% of the workforce has no health insurance in a country leaning heavily towards privatized health care.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost 40% of all deaths in India are still due to infections! (Source: Health and Health Care in India by UCL) The majority of the remainder are due to non-communicable conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, chronic respiratory disorders, and cancers. (Compared to the developed world which manages most chronic respiratory disorders and some of the cardiovascular diseases so well that the patients often die from other causes.) In comparison, the only type of death due to infections to break the top 10 in Canada is death due to influenza and pneumonia which strike down 1.6% of the population to grab the 9th spot. In other words, the number of deaths in India due to easily treatable infections is at least 20 times higher than it should be!

India currently spends about 1.2% of GDP on publicly funded healthcare, an amount considerably less than most other comparable countries. In comparison, health care spending clocks in at 5.1% of GDP in China and Russia and 9% in Brazil! (Total spending on health care, including all private spend, is about 4%, but the private spending is mainly by the rich.) Due to this limited funding, and the substantially insufficient funding allocated to the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) (as outlined in our post on Poverty), 400 Million to 600 Million of the poorest Indians do not get access to the essential medicines they need. When you also consider that India is now the worlds 3rd largest producer of medicine by volume, the absurdity of the situation really comes into the spotlight.

And progress is slow. Even if the extension of the Government’s National Common Minimum Programme, announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the country’s 66th Independence Day achieves its goal and provides access to free public health care to over half of the population by 2017 (as opposed to the fifth who currently have access) via the country’s 160,000 sub-centers, 23,000 primary health care centers, 5,000 community health centers, 1,000 sub-district hospitals, and 600 district hospitals, that will still leave hundreds of millions of Indians without access to even the most basic of health care services. (Furthermore, the proposal that the Federal Government would directly fund 75% of the relatively limited cost of extending the generic medicines supply to the public health service doesn’t go far enough. At least one third of the population cannot afford to pay even 25% of the cost of generic medicine, which, as it is produced in India, represents relatively little cost to the Government.)

And even though 160,000 sub-centers might sound-impressive, the requirements for a sub-center is one Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM) and one Male Health Worker. That’s it. Not even a full nurse. You only find those in Primary Health Centers, Community Health Centers, and Hospitals. In addition, the primary health centers (PHC) also tend to be minimally staffed. They are only required to have one medical officer (doctor) who is supported by an average of 14 paramedical and administrative staff, in total, and, at current numbers, support a population base of 50,000 people! Furthermore, a community health center, which has to serve approximately 200,000 people on average, typically only has four medical specialists (a surgeon, general physician, gynaecologist, and paediatrician). Plus, per capita, the number of physicians is quite low. Right now, India clocks in at roughly 6.5 per 10,000 people (and many of the doctors are in the hospitals), while Canada has 20.7 and the United States has 24.2. (Source, KFF) Also, while India has roughly 1,600 hospitals to serve 1,237 Million people, the United States has almost 6,000 to serve 314 Million people. In other words, there are 15 times as many people per hospital in India as there are in the United States. (770,000 citizens per hospital in India vs 52,000 per hospital in the United States)

Health Care is a huge problem and one that desperately needs to be solved. After all, if your population is not healthy, how can you expect to give it a good education if it’s worrying about being well enough to study? And if you cannot educate it, how can you ready it to take advantage of any opportunity that may give it the hope of lifting itself out of poverty, something which must be done to increase the tax base enough to build the required infrastructure to support the fierce competition of today’s global economy?