Advantages And Disadvantages Of Healthcare

India has an enormous healthcare system which includes public and private hospitals as well as ayurvedic hospitals. Opportunities are many as multiple stakeholders (Mainly providers and payers) are involved in the process of providing care to the patients. Hence it provides tremendous opportunity in terms of both employment and revenue generation. Healthcare sector has a compounded annual growth rate of 16.5% and is going to be worth $280 billion by 2020. This significant growth is because of the rapid privatisation of healthcare. Despite these positives India faces its own set of challenges. Even today there is a difference in the quality of healthcare delivered between the rural and the urban.

According to the 71st National Sample Survey

While most experts agree that serious reforms have to be done to change the current system one cannot simply undermine the efforts of the Government to provide quality healthcare to all its citizens. No matter what schemes the Government has implemented till now it has been able to measure the efficiency of the policy and deliver better results. For instance, finding evidence to evaluate the impact of Rashtriya Swasthiya Bima Yojana (RSBY). In just 5 years RSBY has enrolled 34 million families and provided coverage of secondary hospital care with benefits of about US$ 550 for a family of five. Before RSBY, only about 5% of the population has health insurance. Now it has provided coverage for an additional 110 million people and 35 million households which is about 10% of the population within 5 years something which other private players and other NGO workers could not even come close. The above example shows how Government plays a crucial role in delivering healthcare even to the poorest of the

For example, in Tamilnadu, Public sector entities purchase the medicines in bulk which has significantly reduced the medicine costs. To promote equity in healthcare it is essential that the marginal costs are equally split among the masses. For example, a study from a hospital in Canada suggests that 1% of that state’s patients most of them elderly with multiple chronic conditions consume 34% of all health-care spending and almost 50% of all hospital and long-term patient care costs. Most of the costs associated with the hospital are transaction costs where the public healthcare will be able to absorb the additional costs and thereby reduce the burden on the