Health care crisis looming, Sen warns
Nobel laureate says just 1% of India’s GDP is spent on health care
India spends just a little over one per cent of its GDP on health care and this is leading the country into “a comprehensive health care crisis”, according to Nobel laureate and noted economist Amartya Sen, who has called for greater allocation on health care in India and highlighted what he calls “three general failures” in the country’s health care segment.
“The fact that India allocates only a little over 1 per cent of its gross domestic product on public health care contrasts sharply, for example, with nearly three times as much by China. We reap as we sow, and cannot expect to get what other countries achieve by allocating much more resources — as a proportion of their respective levels of the gross national product — to health care,” Sen writes in his foreword to Healers or Predators? Health care Corruption in India, which will be launched here tomorrow.
‘Deeply flawed’
Sen, a recipient of the Bharat Ratna in 1999, further claims that the entire organisation of Indian health care has become “deeply flawed”, leading the country into “a comprehensive health care crisis”. ■
“Despite being one of the fastest growing economies in the world, India ranks among the poorest achievers of good health. The shortfall of India’s health achievements compared with those of, say, China or Thailand is large and has been growing larger. Even within South Asia, Bangladesh and Nepal have overtaken India in health accomplishment, including in life expectancy.
“If India’s bad record in health care is not much discussed in the Indian press, this neglect does not indicate the presence of a tolerable level of health care in India, but reflects instead the narrow reach of the Indian news media, with its traditional neglect of elementary education and health care,” writes the 84-year-old.
Sen has extensively written on welfare economics and social justice.