COMMERCIALIZATION OF HEALTH CARE AND GROWING MEDICAL COST ON HOUSEHOLD: A CHALLENGE FOR HEALTH EQUALITY IN INDIA

Abstract

Health is the basic requirement for socio-economic, political and cultural development of any society. The government wants to make certain effort for enhancing the well-being of the individual. But due to certain reason it becomes unsuccessful. The most predominant reason is the introduction of privatisation which excludes the role of government in every spare. The services which earlier provided by government now its trends become change. Privatizations touch every aspect but among them the health care got much affected. The main aim of privatization is surplus value. It equates quality with cost. The privatization of health care creates inequalities in healthcare between the countries and within the countries. Privatisation leads to steep hike in health expenditures, increased medical cost, and cost of drugs, medical consultations, medical tests and hospitalisation. It also enlarged the inappropriate competition in the market, this is not because to earn but how to earn more than others. These steep hikes in health expenditure create hindrance among the low-income groups and push them in a vicious circle of poverty. The main aim of this paper was to examine the privatization of healthcare and burden of health expenditure on households. It also Explore the impact of privatization on the quality of care. This paper is primarily based on secondary data. The existing literature revealed that India ranks third in out-of-pocket expenditure on health and almost 60% of total expenditure is paid by the common man and about 3.2% Indians fall below the poverty line due to huge medical bills with about 70% spending their entire saving on healthcare and purchasing drugs. The reviewed data showed that medicines account for 20–30% of global health spending, slightly more in low- and middle-income countries, and, therefore, constitute a major part of the budget of whoever is paying for health services. The finding of this paper exposed that out of the total private medical expenditure, around 72 per cent in rural and 68 per cent in urban areas was made for purchasing ‘medicine’ for non-hospitalised treatment. Rural households primarily depended on their ‘household income/savings’ (68%) and on ‘borrowings’ (25%), the urban households relied much more on their ‘income/saving’ (75%) for financing expenditure on hospitalisation, than on ‘borrowings’ (only 18%) The pivotal problem in healthcare sector is high cost of drugs/medicine and recommending high prized non-generic medicine (NSSO, 2O14).