Parliamentary Panel calls increase in govt health spend in 2021-22 COVID relief driven

This glide path must be secured by ring-fenced, multi-year budgetary commitments rather than single-year allocations that are vulnerable to cutbacks, with progress strictly reported to Parliament on an annual basis, the report said. The Committee complained that the prioritization of healthcare within the broader.

The Committee believes that treating health allocations as expendable once a public health emergency subsides fundamentally undermines the structural integrity and resilience of the healthcare system. The Committee wanted the government to establish and adhere to a statutory minimum threshold for health allocations as.

What Happened

“Such budgetary provision and allocation will guarantee that healthcare retains a permanently prioritized status in the national and state budgets, explicitly safeguarding public health investments from being crowded out or deprioritized in favor of other sectors during non-pandemic years”, the panel said..

• The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare headed by Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav has termed the apparent progress in Government Health Expenditure (GHE), which peaked at 1.84 per cent of.

• Stating that this pandemic-year figure created a misleading impression of advancement toward the 2.5 per cent GHE target, the Committee noted that the ‘distortion’ got corrected only when the delayed 2022-23 estimates revealed a.

• Th Committee wanted the statutory target envisaged under the National Health Policy 2017 to be insulated from emergency fiscal cycles.

Key Details

“The data explicitly reveals that GHE as a percentage of General Government Expenditure (GGE) plummeted from a peak of 6.12 per cent in 2021-22 to just 4.89 per cent in 2022-23, pulling back to a level even lower than the pre-pandemic baseline.

• The Household health expenditure, as a percent of THE, followed the same reversing pattern from 44.10 in 2021-22 to 49.10 in 2022-23.

• The Committee has also proposed the provision of a statutory target of enhancing Government Expenditure and capping on prices of medical drugs, diagnostics and devices to ensure reductions in OOPE as a percentage of.

• This includes expanding PM-JAY coverage, strengthening state health assurance schemes, and improving primary and secondary care availability in public facilities to prevent patients from being pushed into the costly private sector.

Why It Matters

The report recommended aggressive scaling up and deepening of insurance and pooled health financing mechanisms.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by Fortune India as more details emerge