Lifestyle disorders such as diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases were on the rise in 2018, data from India's 14th National Health Profile by the Central Bureau Of Health Intelligence shows.
The National Health Profile focuses on the trends in the diseases, health financing, human resources for health, and health infrastructure. It includes data only from government clinics for the non-communicable diseases and cases reported from the private as well as public sector for infectious diseases.
The number of visitors to the government run clinics rose to 6.5 crores in 2018 from 3.5 crore in 2017. This also led to an increase in the cases of all the disorders.
Infectious diseases, although lower than 2017, were still steadily prevalent in 2018. The national programs for infectious diseases have helped in decreasing the numbers but external environmental factors and existing behaviour have still led to a higher number of cases.
High cases of Non Communicable Diseases In 2018, diabetes increased by 3% to 30.96 lakh cases, hypertension increased by 8% to 39.76 lakh, cardiovascular diseases increased by 47% to 1.95 lakh cases of, stroke by 40% to 65 thousand cases, and cancer by 300% to 1.69 lakh cases.
These cases do not account for the total number of cases in the country as these cases take only those people visiting the government clinics into consideration. The Union Territories of Delhi, Lakshadweep did not report their cases.
Along with this, the number of people suffering from infectious diseases has decreased over the years but are still high in number.
The diseases caused by mosquitoes were the leading infectious diseases. There were 3,99,134 cases of malaria and 1,01,192 cases of dengue in the past year.
Public and Private Health Insurance The report also stated the existing figures for the government's flagship health insurance program Ayushman Bharat.
The figure below mentions the number of beneficiaries of Ayushman Bharat under the three modes under which the scheme is set in motion.
The insurance mode takes into consideration the State and the Centre's premium, the trust mode looks at the actual treatment and compares it with the Central government's Grant-in-Aid, and the mixed mode chose between the premium and the actual cost of treatment.
Since its launch in 2018 till March 2019, a total of Rs. 3,378.7 cr claims were submitted for approval under all the three modes. From these, only Rs. 2,247 cr worth claims were approved. ,
The government initiated the Ayushman Bharat which replaces the Rashtriya Swasthya Bhima Yojana. Delhi, Odisha and Telangana still have not signed the Ministry of Health and Welfare's plan while West Bengal has opted out of the insurance scheme.
This scheme intends to provide a health cover of Rs.5 lakh to 10.74 crore people who need financial risk protection from catastrophic health expenditure. Catastrophic health expenditure is the out of pocket spending on health which eats into a household's basic income leading to an increase in the burden of disease.
In the commercial insurance schemes, people prefer to buy policies from private insurance companies over public insurance companies.
Disparity in health infrastructure and human resources in health There has been an increase in the number of medical colleges in India. In 2018-19, there were 529 medical colleges, while in 17-18, there were 476 colleges.
Till the end of 2018, there were 11,15,686 MBBS practitioners in India, and 7,99,879 AYUSH practitioners by the end of 2017.
Despite this large turnover, there are only 31,641 medical practitioners in the Public Health Centres (PHCs) and Community Health Centres (CHCs) in the rural areas where the predominant population of the nation stays.
Most of these doctors are also AYUSH practitioners.
