Karnataka will be able to partially achieve its priority of providing affordable and quality care going by the increased allocation given to healthcare. This could be accomplished through promotion of public private partnerships, capacity building in trained medical manpower and  health insurance penetration,  according observations made by PricewaterhouseCoopers India.

By escalating the allocation to health and medical education sector from Rs.  2,673 crore in 2010-11 to Rs. 3,254 crore in 2011-12, there has been an increase of Rs. 581 crore or 22 per cent .  However, as a percentage of allocation for plan and non-plan expenditure to various sectors, the allocation to healthcare has reduced from 5.7 per cent last year to 5 per cent this year, stated Pradip Kanakia- Leader Healthcare Practice, PwC India.

There has been an effort  to promote medical R&D through an allocation of Rs. 50 crore to various medical  institutes and for Ayush at  Rs. 15 crore which will help improve the state’s  health index, he added.

Three specific priorities that every state should address to promote inclusive growth in healthcare are public private partnerships, capacity building in trained medical manpower and  health insurance penetration.

Karnataka   has several enablers like  trained medical manpower and existence of hospital infrastructure to take healthcare to the next level. It  needs to promote public private partnerships to enable access to secondary and tertiary care.  The  bed occupancy rate is at  35 per cent, a large number of people who require hospital treatment have not accessed because of high treatment costs. ,  “Measured against these priorities, Karnataka budget has done little to address the health of its citizens at large,” he pointed out.

 The government needed to ensure that the rural and poor benefit  from the Centre’s allocation to National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY).  It  should have announced undertaking  an annual health survey to prepare the district health profile of the rural populace to provide a  scientific allocation of health outlay amongst various districts, he said.

This problem needs to be addressed by augmenting health insurance penetration and higher utilization of the existing facilities by incentivizing the private sector to partner with the government in providing affordable treatment.  While the government has done a good job by contributing Rs.   30-40 crore annually  in the budget to the Yashaswini Health Insurance Scheme and help poor farmers, it has not systematically addressed the health insurance needs of many poor unorganized households in both rural and urban areas.

The government announced a new scheme called ‘Vajpayee Arogya Shri’ last year to cover the below poverty line families for about 400 serious ailments in the Gulbarga.  However, the 2011-12 budget is silent about the  scheme, and  whether any contributions have been made in the current year.  The state also needs to form an empowered and accountable nodal agency to kick start pilot scalable PPP projects in healthcare, he said.