India suffers from twin challenge of high prevalence of communicable disease and risk of premature deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The overall healthcare spend in India is 4.2% of GDP (2018), lowest amongst BRICS counties, while global health care expenditure average amounts to approximately 10.2%. This is further exacerbated as the Government healthcare expenditure has largely been stagnant during last 10 years (~1.2% of GDP in 2018)1 . This has resulted into high out of pocket (OOP) spend on healthcare (65%).
This report on Driving Health Insurance Penetration in India – Covering the Missing Middle - highlights the existing issues in healthcare insurance penetration in India and presents suggestions to address them.