India Needs to Leapfrog to an Integrated Healthcare Ecosystem

IF HEALTH IS WEALTH, we are the poorest nation in the world. Healthcare is a story of exclusion, unaffordability, and poor-quality.

What is understood and appreciated well is that when the economy improves, so does the health of its citizens. However, less understood, and rarely appreciated is the less obvious; that the opposite is equally true.

Most believe health is the ‘absence’ of illness. Our policymakers have mis-diagnosed the healthcare ecosystem and focused on short-termism. They look at healthcare from the narrow prism of ‘operational and technical’ infrastructure (hospitals and doctors) when the solution is social and economic. India’s current provision of just two per cent of GDP on healthcare expenditure is lamentable. Not only is the volume inadequate, the character of the investment equally demonstrates ‘short-termism’. Hospitals and the other ‘physicals’ are more ‘visible’ and a vote catcher and do increase the GDP, but the real multiplier is the investment made in the preventives.

Good health is an asset, has intrinsic value, and instrumental virtue

Health is acatalyst for a broader and virtuous growth cycle; and must bean integral part of economic discussions. And yet, investment decisions around health are evaluated purely as a cost. A Crux study across 14 states, with 1,500 people, 120 practitioners policymakers, health professionals and economists), highlights a co-integration between healthcare investment, health proxies life expectancy, workforce productivity, happiness, upward mobility) and economic growth.