Universal Health Care: The Trojan Horse of Neoliberal Policies

Abstract

This article locates health care and technology within the shifts in capitalist evolution from welfare to neoliberal development and examines why the concept of Comprehensive Primary health care has been distorted by the market to varying extents globally. Its focus is on India’s planning process where the thrust is to transform health services into commodities and tools of extraction of profit to which all levels of health care are subordinated. Since the 1990s, all Plans, official planning committees and legislations are meant to mould services in this direction. Instead of an integrated health service with primary health care getting support from the secondary and tertiary, the current thrust of the planning process has been to fragment health service into independent components—UHC, tertiary care and NRHM—in the name of providing rural and urban health services. In each of these strategies, public–private partnerships, commercialisation and appropriation of the public resources are the dominant trends. UHC thus no more remains the state-led integrated and inclusive service but a Trojan horse of the neoliberal strategy.