India should not persevere with its focus on privatising healthcare or relying on health insurance.The image that would haunt me for a long time from this year is that of Dana Majhi, whose wife died of tuberculosis (TB) in a district hospital in Odisha. He was shown on television carrying his wife’s corpse, with his 10-year-old daughter by her side, walking back to his village because hospital could not provide him with a hearse van. A pathetic visual of a broken and insensitive health system. And if that visual is not convincing enough for those who want evidence, a landmark paper published in The Lancet this year should be: it confirms the poor status of healthcare in India. Authors estimated the baseline status of countries on the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In simple terms, these estimates provide the status of health across all countries, and India was at the 143rd place out of 188 countries, just below Congo and Comoros. Not an enviable position to be in.

 

Read more at www.thewire.in