Abandon PMJAY, make healthcare a fundamental right: People’s manifesto

The expenditure on the ‘Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana’ , estimated to range between ₹12,000 and ₹50,000 Crore as per different estimates, should be spent on expanding public health facilities and creation of permanent public assets, asserts a people’s health manifesto released on Monday.

The manifesto calls upon the Government to abandon the flagship scheme based on what it described as the ‘discredited insurance model’.

The manifesto also called upon the Government to stop privatising district hospitals and corporatising medical education and ensure ‘Right to Healthcare’ as a fundamental right.

The Government has been busy in strengthening private health infrastructure at the cost of public health institutions and the direction, it says, should be reversed to ensure universal and affordable healthcare to the people.

The manifesto also lists the following demands:

• Regularise all contractual health workers
• Provide adequate training to public health staff
• Ensure fair wages and decent working conditions and protection from stifling labour laws
• Reverse the trend of reducing the national health budget in recent years

The manifesto blames the Government for refusing to put in place effective regulation of the private medical sector, allowing this sector to continue massive profiteering at the cost of patients, especially by corporate hospitals; unwillingness to effectively control prices of medicines, based on cost of production and allowing marketing of hundreds of irrational and harmful Fixed Dose Drug Combinations (FDCs).

The Government has also failed to bring in a legal code to eliminate unethical marketing practices by the pharmaceutical industry, the manifesto adds.

The manifesto calls upon political parties to commit to raise public expenditure on health to 3.5% of the GDP in the medium term and to 5% in the long run. This would translate to per capita health outlay of ₹4000 in the medium term and ₹6000 in the longer run.

All future governments must guarantee, demands the people’s manifesto, access to essential and life-saving medicines and diagnostics in all public facilities. “The scope and coverage of this scheme should be no less than the ongoing schemes in Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Rajasthan, which would ensure access to the full range of essential medicines and medical investigations, without any fees, at all levels of health facilities,” the manifesto adds.

It calls upon all political parties to commit to the revival of existing public sector units and establishing new public sector drugs and vaccine production units towards self reliant medicine production in the country. “Provide adequate funding to all public sector medicine research institutions. Encourage pharmaceutical research through Open Source Drug Discovery mode,” it says.