Archive - Aug 26, 2008
India's Healthcare Plan for the Poor: Put it on a Card
India's public health care system is in a state of crisis.
Time Magazine recently ran photos of hospitals swamped with patients and their families in a report that says India's "massive population" has led to "overloading systems where they do exist and aiding the spread of disease in the many places they don't." A Brookings Institution report says the rural medical practitioners who perform 80 percent of India's outpatient care "have no formal qualifications for it. They sometimes lack even a high school diploma."
But the Wall Street Journal reports that India's central government is stepping up with a new National Health Insurance Program. For just $1, India's poor can receive a card that entitles them to $700 of care at most public or private hospitals.
To enroll, families must make less than $100 per year and pay the $1 fee. To support the program the government will pay out $1 billion to insurance companies, who say their involvement will help them market to participants whose future income may turn them into paying customers. Already, about 1.5 million people have signed up, and plans for expansion are in the works.
While the use of the card is limited to care at hospitals, it still goes a long way to reduce the chance that medical debt will financially crush already-impoverished families. And with one-third of the world's poor living within its borders, India is right to address its health care challenge.
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