Assocham in collaboration with India Health Progress (IHP) recently organised a conference on 'access to healthcare' in New Delhi, to address the burgeoning concern about the need to ensure healthcare access in India. The event brought together health experts and industry leaders to elicit their views on aspects such as affordability and outreach, healthcare innovations and health insurance.

During this event industry stakeholders come together to deliberate accessibility issues as well as debate whether pricing actually hinders access to healthcare.

In the event Kewal Handa, chairman, Assocham drug and pharma council, and managing director of Pfizer stressed that Indian medicines are the lowest priced in the world and the Indian healthcare market is the most competitive for pharma companies, thus availability of medicines, facilities at the right time and provision of an umbrella of insurance coverage are imperative.

The event was supported by India Health Progress, an independent initiative of institutions and individuals aligned towards ensuring universal access to healthcare in India. Aman Gupta, principal advisor, India Health Progress, said: “India’s diverse and multicultural society, characterised by overpopulation and rapid but unequal economic growth, often faces underutilisation of effective healthcare. Many factors contribute to this burden and thus it is imperative for healthcare authorities to take a series of steps to address all issues that can impede access, not pricing alone.”

India’s healthcare industry is poised to reach US$ 55 billion by 2020. However, many healthcare challenges still remain unaddressed. Dr Bibek Debroy, renowned economist, professor, Centre for policy research and author of the White Paper titled ‘The Indian Health Sector – providing choice, competition, efficiency and finance’ shared his views on the topic of providing choice and competition to drive efficiency.

He stated, “Although choice and competition drive efficiency, in the 1960s the emphasis shifted to public funding and public provisioning. As a result, an ambience of inefficiency and stagnation pervaded the health sector. Although choice and competition once again came to the fore with liberalisation in July 1991, the public sector still lacks efficiency, functioning in a perfunctory manner. Moreover, with pricing of drugs being mistakenly linked with lack of healthcare access, price control measures were implemented but these failed to improve access.”

He added that to engineer favourable outcomes that help India meet its healthcare goals, focus should lie on improving delivery and infrastructure issues, skills up-gradation, addressing the disease burden and developing efficient Public-Private Partnership models.

There was a common consensus on the point that the Government should shift their focus to other alternatives that actually benefit the poor by improving distribution channels to ensure easy availability, provide training to FMCG distributors to dispense basic essential medicines in rural areas etc. It was also suggested that a universal health insurance cover like the RSBY to cover medicinal costs and OPD should be devised so that it would reduce the out of pocket burden faced by the poor.

The recommendations include collaborating efforts to bridge the rural and urban divide, developing innovative products and models of service and delivery, increasing health insurance cover and incentivising healthcare personnel, and learning from successful global health practices.