Healthcare for the poor

IN addition to a number of impoverishing factors, excessive health costs are making around 6.4 million, or four percent, of the population poorer every year. The supreme irony is that to cater to a pressing basic need like medicare, which should be the obligation of the state to provide, the poor have to foot the bill for it.
This revelation made by an ICDDR,B study makes one sit up and take note of the highly skewed pattern of healthcare dispensation in the country. Clearly, health investment does not go where it is most needed.
In a country where out-of-pocket health expenditure is 64 percent with the rest coming from government and other sources, how much the poor are placed at a disadvantage can be easily imagined!
Interestingly though, our health infrastructure is about the best in the region. But most health complexes are chronically deficient in services as the equipment and appliances rust away without doctors and nurses at their posts. The apathy of doctors towards any so-called compulsory rural stints in no time translates into absenteeism or at best irregular presence. In some extreme cases one might have seen news photos of cattle grazing in the premises and stray dogs sniffing away at littered objects.
Strategies backed by political will and financing will have to be implemented for an optimal use of the health complexes, which hold the key for domiciliary medicare. That way, healthcare can be cost-efficient and affordable.