Priorities for India’s National Health Policy

Abstract

This paper recommends that India’s public health funding must focus on ‘public goods’ in health – primary and preventive care, vaccination and sanitation among others. Improved governance and management is absolutely critical for actual delivery of health services – the Tamil Nadu Medical Services Corporation governance model could be adopted at larger scale for managing all health services delivered by the states. Human resource shortages should be plugged by paramedics – graduates of a three-year course have been shown to be as good as MBBS doctors for common rural primary health problems. Higher levels of care should be left to the market, while government should focus on providing balanced and transparent regulation to enable the market to function. Health care financing pitfalls can be avoided by adopting Health Savings Accounts which allow tax exempt savings that can only be used for medical purposes.