Decline in Per Capita Government Spending on Healthcare

September 13, 2022

According to the recently released National Health Accounts 2018-2019, public spending of health has declined to 1.28 per cent of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Key Facts

The National Health Accounts 2018-2019 revealed that the public spending on healthcare has fallen from 1.35 per cent in 2017-18 to 1.28 per cent in 2018-19.
This is significantly lesser than the goal set by the National Health Policy 2017, which sought to increase the government’s healthcare spending to 2.5 per cent by 2025.
The government spent Rs.1,815 per capita on health in 2018-19 as against Rs.2,155 per capita out-of-pocket spending during the same period.
The total health expenditure in 2018-19 was Rs.5,96,440 crore. The government spending accounted for 40.61 per cent of this amount. This is 4.81 per cent of the General Government Expenditure during that period.
The corresponding share of out-of-pocket expenditure is 48.2 per cent. This is nearly half of all health spending and higher than the government spending.
Over 28.69 per cent of health expenditure was in private hospitals. This is higher than the health expenditure in government hospitals, which accounted for 17.34% in the health expenditure.
Much of the spending went into impatient curative care, which accounted for 34.55% of the expenditure.
The latest figures are in line with the current trend of a decline in out-of-pocket expenditure as a share of total health expenditure. In 2013, it accounted for 64.2 per cent of the total health expenditure.
However, the household out-of-pocket expenditure on health continues to dominate as it stood at Rs. 2,87,573 crore in 2018-19.
The private health insurance expenditure accounts for just 6.57 per cent of the total health spending and has been stagnating for years.
This is mainly because of the rigid conditions and inequities put by the private insurance firms.

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