Paving the path towards universal health coverage

International Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Day falls in December. For India, the road to UHC starts with increasing government spending on health, a national priority as per the government's policy documents.

- Neethi Rao, Alok Kumar, Sandhya Venkateswaran

The Ayushman Bharat programme provides the structure for translating such investment into concrete outcomes for the people. It includes Ayushman Arogya Mandirs for comprehensive primary health services—promotive, preventive, curative, palliative and rehabilitative care—without incurring any financial burden. It also features the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) which uses the health insurance model to provide access to secondary and tertiary health care to nearly 50% of the population. These are ambitious policies that depend on an improved fiscal context and coordinated governance across the central and state governments. Directed investments towards strengthening institutional governance and capacities for regulation, quality control, enforcement, fraud control, grievance redressal and research have to be prioritised.

The Centre can coordinate through the National Health Authority and its state-level counterparts that already operate under PMJAY to arrive at the specific health services to be covered under this UBP. Key inclusion criteria could be arrived at through the identification of priority health areas and taking into account budget and administrative realities. Service users would be free to pick their providers since all legal providers would be automatically enrolled under the UBP.