Broad Conclusions and Policy Directions

Drawing upon a set of comprehensive field-based data and an in-depth analysis of the OOP health payments by a cross-section of households from selected rural and urban areas of three different states—UP, Rajasthan and Delhi—there appear to be major challenges ahead for both the planners and administrators of health-care services. This can easily be noticed from the discussion so far. While this chapter however does not intend to replicate most of that discussion or its underlying messages in a conventional setting, it does attempt to cull out briefly a few of the major observations after piecing them together from different chapters as reference points. As regards directions of policy, this chapter sets out to provide scores of considered opinion given by the respondents on issues of critical concerns, e.g. recent increase in health-care charges, overprescription of medicines and/or diagnostics by medical professionals and role of drugs in making health care expensive. This will be followed by another set of respondents’ reactions covering issues in a policy framework such as health insurance and the extent respondents would be willing to go for such a product on a payment basis. Most of these questions and their responses are expected to help in deriving a host of policy recommendations based on considered judgments of those who really matter. It may nevertheless be noted that in no way these recommendations may be treated as out of the box.