Publication:

The road to universal health coverage: an overview of global and Indian scenarios

The declaration of World Health Assembly in the year 2005 paved the way for all the member states to plan for the transition towards universal coverage to their respective citizens. This was underpinned by the notion that access to quality basic and essential health services has to be made available for everyone to combat poverty and to achieve the developmental goals worldwide. This global movement towards universal coverage is considered as one of the greatest transitions in health, the other being the demographic transition and epidemiological transition. Since the adoption of Universal Health Coverage (UHC), the road taken by each country to achieve UHC is diverse and unique to its culture, needs of people and health systems in the respective country. However, all these approaches have a commonality of promoting and providing health insurance as an important mechanism to achieve UHC. Providing health insurance to ensure health coverage for all the citizens has been well tested and proved to be a viable option. But, addressing other needs and requirements of health systems such as expansion of health infrastructure, reinforcement of the health care workforce and reorganization of the existing health systems in line with newer policies is also extremely important.