Second part of Guardian Healthcare's guide to healthcare systems in the fast growing BRIC countries, covering India and China
Building BRICs: healthcare in Brazil, Russia, India and China is developing with their economies, but in different ways. Photograph: Hanquan Chen/Getty Images/iStockphoto
India
Largely as a result of the colonial influence, India's healthcare is state and territory-organised in what some experts have observed is a macro version of the UK's pre-1974 NHS structure. Under the government's National Health Policy of 1983 – updated in 2002 – healthcare is largely free at the point of care, although the booming population and ageing demographic means the universal healthcare system is both overloaded and underfunded, despite considerable investment by the government over the years.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers report from 2007 estimated that 80% of healthcare expenditure in India was private, illustrating the scale of the funding problem. Recent analysis suggests that only 11% of the population has any form of health insurance coverage in an insurance market dominated by the government-run General Insurance Company and its four subsidiaries.
For full article:
No comments:
Post a Comment