Dec 08 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Treatment for a Malignant India





Healthcare needs an urgent remedy

Some segments of India's healthcare have turned into sources of shame and sorrow, instead of being sources of succour and sustenance. Cataract operations leave people blind, instead of helping them see better. Sterilisation surgeries kill women in large numbers, thanks to spurious drugs. The US and Europe ban import of drugs produced at the facilities of leading Indian pharma companies.The official response to these developments has been knee-jerk penalties in combination with self-serving condemnation. This cannot continue. The problem must be appreciated and tackled at the systemic level. Lives and livelihoods are at stake.To begin with, public health engineering needs a massive dose of investment, to give people ready access to clean drinking water and freedom from filth and pollution.The Swachh Bharat campaign takes care of the awareness part of the needed change, but neglects the engineering part, for sewage treatment, sorting and recyclingco mposting of solid waste manageme nt. We have a massive undersupply of hospitals, doctors and other health workers. There are no standards for clinics and pathological labs. Regula tion of the fragmented pharma indus try is schizophrenic. Unconscionable energy is spent on bashing foreign and devising ways to knock off their pat drug companies and devising ways to knock off their patented output, and not enough in indigenous R&D. Spurious drugs abound and are patronised by politicians.High-minded suspicion of private enterprise in healthcare gets the power of legal intervention to stall and curtail infant immunisation efforts. Doctors are forced to choose hypocrisy over Hippocrates, when they pay huge `capitation fees' to get enrolled for a Master's, leaving them with the compulsion to milk the system to generate enough moolah to recover their investment. They get room to manoeuvre in the gap between the misaligned incentives of health insurance and care providers.
Every one of the fatal flaws has to be fixed. India cannot progress as a nation with its present healthcare set-up.And the issue goes far beyond raising budgetary outlays.