Effectiveness Of PPPs

PPPs should be carried forward if they reduce out of pocket expenses and results in increasedutilisationof services

- Ayanabh Debgupta

Globally, the role of the Governments in delivering healthcare to its people has long been an ongoing debate and more often than not, we have seen healthcare market failings as a result of too much or too little or the wrong kind of Government interventions. Over the years, Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have increasingly become popular worldwide as a way of improving healthcare service delivery in many developed countries and billions of dollars are being deployed through PPP to address public health challenges. However, it is still a relatively new phenomenon in majority of the developing countries, owing to their large populations and inherent deficiencies within the public healthcare delivery systems.

While most countries are still struggling, a few seem to have temporarily found a difficult balance between meeting their federal obligations of equitably providing acceptable quality healthcare to its people, by directly providing essential healthcare services to its underprivileged and simultaneously allowing private participation in the healthcare market to service the self-paying population, many a at times even by financing healthcare services through insurance mechanism. However, it is mostly through a well thought out framework of appropriate regulatory mechanisms to both facilitate and control private participation.

In the Indian context, wherein the Government spends about 1.3% of its GDP on healthcare (well below the world average of 6%) to directly provide a sizable quantum of healthcare services, its inconsistencies, inefficiencies and poor quality forces a significant portion of the population, including those from financially underprivileged segment to seek care from the private sector, costs of which often result in catastrophic effects on their living standards, pushing over 7% of them below the poverty threshold every year.