The Planning Commission has set a target of raising the total public expenditure on health to 2.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product by the end of the 12th Plan period, after the previous Plans continuously failed to achieve the targets set in the past years.

According to current estimates, the public health expenditure is likely to touch only 1.8 per cent by the end of the present 11th Plan, against 3 per cent set at the beginning of the Plan period. The Planning Commission has now constituted a high-level expert group on universal health coverage under the chairmanship of Prof K Srinath Reddy to help define appropriate strategies.

“The report is awaited before the finalisation of the next Plan. Their recommendations will be an important input in defining a comprehensive health strategy for the next ten years,” sources said.

“While the Twelfth Plan must re-strategise to achieve faster progress towards the set goals,  it must also define its health care strategy more broadly. The NRHM has focussed heavily on child birth and pre-natal care. It must however expand to a more comprehensive vision of health care, which includes service delivery for a much broader range of conditions, covering both preventive and curative services. The Twelfth Plan will prioritise convergence among all the existing National Health Programmes under the NRHM umbrella, namely those for mental health, AIDS control, deafness control, care of the elderly, information, education and communication, cancer control, tobacco control, cardiovascular diseases, oral health, fluorosis, human rabies control, and leptospirosis,” the sources said..

The Eleventh Plan had noted that although the total expenditure on health in India as a percentage of GDP was around 5 per cent, (which is roughly comparable to other developing countries), there was a disproportionally high reliance on private, particularly household’s out of pocket expenditure.  The Eleventh Plan sought to correct this imbalance by raising the share of public expenditure on health (both Plan and non-Plan) in the Centre and States taken together from less than 1 per cent of GDP in 2006-07 to 2 per cent to 3 per cent of GDP to be achieved over a period of time.