Financing Universal Health Care in India

With a low Tax to GDP ratio of only 17%, despite allocating 10% of its revenues to healthcare, India will be unable to finance all of her healthcare needs from public expenditures. Therefore, the only way to ensure that all of her citizens get good healthcare, is for the Indian government to emerge as a single payer and design a high quality, primary care centric health care system which is free for all citizens at the point of service, whether provided by the public or the private sector. Such a health system would incorporate features such as gatekeeping at the primary care level so that all citizens are able to visit hospitals only if they have been referred to them by their primary care providers and would require participating healthcare networks to bear risk directly instead of transferring them to insurance companies. The government would use its general revenue resources to pay the premium for those that are poor and the non-poor would be required to mandatorily enrol themselves into this health system by paying the necessary premium upfront to the government.