Beyond numbers, coverage and cost: adaptive governance for post-COVID-19 reforms in India.

### Summary box Crisis as an opportunity for change has been part of historical and development literature and is an oft-repeated theme. The Chinese word for crisis (危機), for example, consists of two symbols often characterised in popular literature as denoting ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.1 For India’s healthcare system, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the urgency of reform. We have learnt that no matter how long or how stringent a lockdown is, we cannot flatten the curve effectively, nor fairly, without a robust health system. In the pre-COVID-19 world, practitioners and policy-makers were gathering around the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) agenda that sought to expand the number of health services provided to the largest number of beneficiaries at the cheapest possible cost, constituting the three dimensions of UHC.2 This pandemic has made it clear that …