A large part of my career I have spent on working on this issue through research, trainings, campaigns, advocacy... This is a dream that I have nurtured since I go into the field of health way back in 1982 when I joined the Foundation for Research in Community Health. Under the then raging community health movement one was swayed by experimental alternatives and the NGO sector seemed to appear as a panacea to realizing this dream but a quick study of this sector made it very clear to us that some of the NGOs were in the business of charity and others were just in business, albeit with an alternate approach that atelast appeared to be progressive on the face of it. With further research into households and their expenditures on health care in 1987 it became crystal clear that healthcare was a business the way it was being run, whether run by the government, private sector or the NGOs. The need was to change this so that healthcare was reestablished as a public good, that is it was not left to the mercy o the markets. Thats the key essence of healthcare and only when we imbibe that will we be able to realize the dream of right to healtcare...
Actually I do not see it as a dream anymore. In fact that was the mistake.. How can right to healthcare be a dream? It has to be a reality!
Then some of us friends came together and set up Anusandhan Trust in 1992 and its first centre the Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT) with the objective of moving towards establishing right to healthcare. We pursued the same interests and tried to reach out to the larger world by expanding debate and dialogue on these issues, collaborating with many others who had joined this struggle. Through this emerged the Peoples Health Movement in 2000 and later its campaign on Right ot Healthcare. (see http://phmovement.org/ )
The PHM's campaign of Health For All Now and the right to healthcare while mobilzing communities and civil society has been collaborating with public agencies like the National Human Rights Commission and the National Rural Health Mission etc.. with an increasing hope of realizing the right to healthcare.
While this goal may still appear to be distant it is becoming increasingly desired by more and more people. The question is not whether this is possible but whether we want to make it possible... Resources are not really an issue. In one of my other posts Money for Right to Health I show that we do not have dearth of resources and that we can actually realize this with less than half of what we all spend on healthcare, mostly out of pocket and with very poor results. Thus if we make right to healthcare a reality then we will actually save resources that we spend wastefully on unregulated healthcare....
Actually I do not see it as a dream anymore. In fact that was the mistake.. How can right to healthcare be a dream? It has to be a reality!
Then some of us friends came together and set up Anusandhan Trust in 1992 and its first centre the Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT) with the objective of moving towards establishing right to healthcare. We pursued the same interests and tried to reach out to the larger world by expanding debate and dialogue on these issues, collaborating with many others who had joined this struggle. Through this emerged the Peoples Health Movement in 2000 and later its campaign on Right ot Healthcare. (see http://phmovement.org/ )
The PHM's campaign of Health For All Now and the right to healthcare while mobilzing communities and civil society has been collaborating with public agencies like the National Human Rights Commission and the National Rural Health Mission etc.. with an increasing hope of realizing the right to healthcare.
While this goal may still appear to be distant it is becoming increasingly desired by more and more people. The question is not whether this is possible but whether we want to make it possible... Resources are not really an issue. In one of my other posts Money for Right to Health I show that we do not have dearth of resources and that we can actually realize this with less than half of what we all spend on healthcare, mostly out of pocket and with very poor results. Thus if we make right to healthcare a reality then we will actually save resources that we spend wastefully on unregulated healthcare....
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