Finances for Health in India: Are New Sources the Way to Go?

Indrani Gupta and Samik Chowdhury ()
Additional contact information
Samik Chowdhury: Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi

No 356, IEG Working Papers from Institute of Economic Growth

Abstract: The Government of India has proposed the National Health Assurance Mission (NHAM) to move the country rapidly towards universal health coverage (UHC), by providing all citizens with specified drugs, diagnostics, and services. Currently, India's public spending on health is one of the lowest in the world. Recent pronouncements from the government indicate a further cut in the health budget, indicating a serious discrepancy between policy intentions and necessary financial provisions. Against this backdrop, this paper offers two broad options to enhance fiscal space for health in India: (a) superior utilisation of the existing resource envelope through reprioritisation and reallocation within the social sector, including pooling of fragmented allocations; and (b) identification of new revenue handles for the health sector and choice of the most sustainable of these

Keywords: Health financing; fiscal space; absorptive capacity; innovation; corporate social responsibility; health cess (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 H60 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, 2015, pages 1-39

Downloads: (external link)
https://iegindia.org/upload/publication/Workpap/wp356.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Finances for Health in India: Are New Sources the Way to Go? (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:awe:wpaper:356

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEG Working Papers from Institute of Economic Growth
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().