Monday, November 07, 2011

Misplaced priorities

Seeing the decadent health care in India, there are several questions that spring to my mind:

1) Do we lack funds?

The answer is a big NO. We can afford to squander away money in fancy schemes like NREGA. Despite their huge ticket prices, it is not known what has been the impact on the ground. While the goals towards being a welfare state is laudable, it creates millions of dependents on Government dole.

2) Do we lack trained manpower?

Actually, the cities see a huge influx of patients due to non existent primary health care in most pockets of the country. At the same time, Medical Profession is one of the least paid white collared segment of the employed cadre. The state governments are shying away from employing Doctors on a permanent scale and those serving are unable to barely make the two ends meet due to rampaging inflation.

3) Why has the health sector investment fallen?

This is very hard to answer. As such, the corporate sector including the pharma companies have stepped up in a big way to ramp the missing infrastructure. As such, the profit making is the their sole responsibility.

These are very broad assertions but unfortunately Congress and their ilk has ensured that we stay poor till eternity.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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