Better Health Systems for India's Poor

Abstract

Chauhan, Abha (1990). Tribal women and social change in India. A.C. Brothers, Etawah Chelte, Anthony F. (1989)-"Corporate culture as an impediment to employee involvement-when you can't get there from here-work and occupations "vol .16 (2), pp 153-164 Cronin and Taylor, "Measuring service quality re-examination"(1992)

Coping with health‐care costs: implications for the measurement of catastrophic expenditures and poverty

“…Social networks are important sources of financial support, and labor substitution is one of the main strategies to reduce the burden of income loss. Peters et al (2001), using the same data as we do in this paper, show that poorer Indian households are more likely to finance inpatient care through borrowing and sales of assets and, according to Bonu et al (2005), these strategies are also more common when hospitalized individuals are rural, male, head of the household, belong to a Scheduled Caste or Tribe and uneducated. While the small-scale qualitative studies suggest that coping strategies are used to shield household consumption from health shocks, the econometric panel data evidence indicates that informal mechanisms do not provide full insurance against this risk (Dercon and Krishnan, 2000;Gertler and Gruber, 2002;Lindelow and Wagstaff, 2005;De Weerdt and Dercon, 2006;Wagstaff, 2007).…”

“…In India, private health spending accounts for more than 80% of all health expenditure and public spending on health represents less than 1% of GDP (Peters et al, 2001). In rural areas more than 90% households have no insurance at all and in urban areas over 75% are uninsured (National Sample expenditure net of coping payments.…”

“…The private sector has become the dominant provider of inpatient care, reflecting a narrowing of privatepublic price differentials and public sector shortages (Sen et al, 2002). The proportion of people forgoing treatment for financial reasons almost doubled (National Sample Survey Organisation, 1998a) and in 1996, non-poor households were twice as likely to be hospitalized (Peters et al, 2001). According to the latest figures from the National Sample Survey Organisation (2006), the financial strain caused by hospitalization seems to have worsened between 1996 and 2004; reliance on coping strategies, such as borrowing, to pay for hospital care has increased, at least in rural areas.…”

International health policy and stagnating maternal mortality: is there a causal link?

“…54 Badly paid health professionals who are left to manage public facilities with an economic rationale tend to introduce a commercial logic to service delivery in order to maximise income. 55,56 Autonomously managed government hospitals in low-income settings tend to admit a middle-class child with diarrhoea rather than a township woman 59 but sometimes in isolation from the rest of the country.…”

The New Evidence on Male Circumcision: An Indian Perspective

“…Systems would need to be developed and put in place for monitoring quality of care, safety and complications, not only in the public sector, but also in the private health sector, which addresses 80% of the health care needs of the population. 12 Given the stigma attached to HIV and AIDS, a major concern is whether those accepting this intervention stand a risk of being labelled as at higher risk for HIV exposure. A major challenge then would be the positioning of this intervention so as to avoid this stigma.…”