India's healthcare sector needs healthy touch

It is an irony that all subsidies put together account for 3-4 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP) whereas public healthcare gets only 1 percent of our GDP.

McKinsey report says, this number should be around 5.5 percent. Is the government of the day in sync with ground reality? On the face of it, it does not seem so. In the XII Plan government intends to spend 2.5 percent of GDP in healthcare against one percent spent in the earlier plans. It maybe a big step from the governments point of view but pales when compared to countries like China who spends 5.5 percent of its GDP. In case of USA, it is 17 percent and UN member countries 9.7 percent.      This low spending by the government is hitting one billion plus population of India really very hard. That is because there is a rapid rise in lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart conditions, cancer and the age old diseases like tuberculosis and malaria still continue. It is true that the healthcare infrastructure has not kept pace with this rising demand and there lies the problem.