Friday, September 28, 2012

Health is the real wealth..



We all know about general condition of public health care system in India , low level of cleanliness, general gap between demand and supply, low reliability of quality medical facilities like pathology tests, x-ray machines, etc then what to tell about the availability of ultrasound, ECG, EEG, MRIs, and other advanced facilities, at district hospitals in India. Beside this I think around 50% Indians have to depend totally upon these government hospitals for treatment because they have no other choice due to unaffordable cost of health services in private hospitals. Even then they have to spend around 50% of their average income in health services as even in government hospitals people have to arrange for medicines and others on their own(not to mention things like health insurance as they are very new and even rare for majority of Indian population). Now coming to medicines, pharma chain right from production to retail is making the most profitable business as I don’t think there is any other business with such a huge profit margins(sometimes more than 100%)in India. What to say about governments, they are making huge revenue without doing anything in the form of taxes of varied nature. Striking this phenomena supreme court from long ago directs the governments to provide generic medicines (which are of very low cost with same effectiveness, as they got exemption under intellectual property rights laws) to masses, but they didn’t do anything untill yesterday, when they announced a new pharma policy under which 348 important and most popular medicines  are to be made available in generic form for the people at large. Courts also directs governments to regulate the rates charged at the private hospitals and tests and diagnostics centers for providing services to people, but nothing significant has happened yet. Now cost of private hospitals are regulated in house, according to the commercial principle of demand and supply. Hence even after more than 65 years of independence, fate of Indian population is in the hands of almighty god as in earth even in so called democracies there is no one, who could really bring quick transformation in their lives. Let see what color this initiative of central government spreads to the condition of health services in India.

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