Upset over its suggestions not being incorporated in the draft 12th Plan document, the Health Ministry may give an alternative chapter and submit it to the Planning Commission.
The full Plan panel is slated to meet this month-end for final adoption of the 12th Plan draft document.
Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has already shot off a letter addressed to Pronab Sen of the Planning Commission, a Health Ministry source said, and added that the Minister was personally looking into the matter.
According to reports, the Minister’s letter hits out at the Plan panel’s suggested pilot models that “heavily promote corporatisation of health”, and reiterates that the Ministry’s stance of developing a strong public health system be supplemented by private sector participation, not vice-versa.
Following criticism from the Health Ministry, health activists as well as the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) on health constituted by it, the Plan panel is now said to be revisiting the chapter on health.
According to the Ministry and health activists, including of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA), which is represented in the HLEG, the document has used the panel’s recommendations on Universal Health Care “rather selectively”.
The document recommends increase in public expenditure on health from the present one per cent to 1.58 per cent of GDP, in sharp contrast to the HLEG recommendation of raising this expenditure to at least 2.5 per cent of GDP.
This will ensure that India remains among the bottom 10 nations in terms of public spending on health, it added.
Health activists feel the focus of the document has shifted to a ‘managed care’ approach, paving the way for greater private role in public healthcare.
They feared that this would lead to the Government abandoning its role in providing healthcare and becoming just a ‘manager’ of a largely corporatised system.
This would also decisively halt and eventually reverse the moderate achievements of the National Rural Health Mission, in expanding public health infrastructure and services in parts of the country, the JSA added.