Health policy for the coming year

Context: While the lockdown is easing, the government healthcare policy decisions should direct towards decentralisation in testing process and engaging with private healthcare.

About Healthcare Crisis

• Prevention: The standard methods of isolation and social distancing have not worked well barring in some states like Kerala and Tamilnadu.

• State Coercive Power : over private healthcare sends a wrong message and diminishes the commitment of private involvement in public health.

• Degraded private healthcare: through the combination of finance and human resource crisis.

• Unavailability of micro-data: The key gap in public health is population scale measurement which is required to generate better private decisions.

Desired Health Care Policy:

• Health policy consists of two prongs, prevention (i.e. public health) and cure (i.e. health care).

• Public health

• Decentralised Testing: Identifying the parameters like disease spread, development of immunity through Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) so that individuals can better decisions on how to modify everyday life.

• Health care (70% of healthcare in India provided by private sector)

• Recognizing the Private potential: Utilising the information that they carry with them and providing them incentives. 
• Voluntary private participation: with local and state governments to build new capacity by sophisticated public financial management (PFM).

Way Forward:

• The information about the pandemic spread from the private healthcare system can be subsequently used for private and community decision making at the micro level. 
• A Fiscal Plan is required through which finances can reach cities and districts.