Health Expenditure on Select Ailments in India.

Abstract

Background: The changing patterns in the incidence of diseases have highlighted the importance of increasing government intervention toward noncommunicable diseases, but a detailed analysis is needed at the specific disease level.

Objectives: This study attempts to look in some detail at the burden of disease and the share of private and public sectors in providing health facilities across some selected ailments.

Materials and methods: Some specific ailments in both communicable and noncommunicable disease segments including infections, respiratory, cardiovascular, diabetes, and gastrointestinal are identified based on high disability index and medical costs. The unit-level data by the National Sample Surveys on Social Consumption related to Health carried out in the 71st and 75th Rounds along with Global Burden of Disease data provided by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation formed the database.

Results: The number of ailments per 1000 persons in the last 15 days of the survey held for the out-patient cases reveal that infections stood at the highest level of 32% followed by cardiovascular at 16.7%. Despite low average annual expenditure on communicable diseases, the high number of hospitalized cases increase the total expenditure on this segment multifold.

Conclusions: In this ailments-based analysis, the rising incidence of non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and neoplasms is observed along with the high incidence of the upper and the lower respiratory tract diseases and other infections which have afflicted Indian population for decades. Both in terms of deaths and disability index, two ailments in the communicable disease segment, namely, chronic respiratory diseases and infections need to be addressed along with rising incidence of cardiovascular diseases and cancer. The disproportionately higher burden of medical expenses on the low-income strata and stark differences between public and private sectors in the costs of providing health facilities needs to be addressed by target allocation of government budget.