The key objective of this research was to generate new evidence on outpatient antibiotic prescription rate and patterns in the private sector in India. We used 12-month period (May 2013 to April 2014) medical audit dataset from IQVIA (formerly IMS Health).

The objective of this research is to generate new evidence on financial implications of medicines out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for households. Another objective is to investigate which disease conditions contributed to a significant proportion of households’ financial burden.

Original Source

Pursuing its neo-liberal agenda of decontrol and liberalisation, the present government is planning to move towards market-based pricing from the current cost-plus-based pricing mechanism for drugs under price control. By refusing to include fi xed dose combinations of essential medicines, sticking only to dosages and strengths involving essential drugs and leaving out "me too" drugs in similar therapeutic classes, the government is designing escape routes for companies to wriggle out of the price control mechanism.

A reply to T R Dilip's assertion (EPW, 5 May 2012) that Sakthivel Selvaraj and Anup K Karan (EPW, 17 March 2012) arrived at unacceptable conclusions due to methodological fl aws with regard to assessing the effectiveness of publicly-fi nanced health insurance schemes.

This paper provides early and robust evidence on the impact of publicly-financed health insurance schemes on financial risk protection in India’s health sector.

Drawing on evidence from the past morbidity and health surveys (1986-87 to 2004) and consumer expenditure surveys (1993-94 to 2004-05) of the National Sample Survey Organisation, this paper argues that public provisions of healthcare in India has dwindled to new lows.