Determinants of private healthcare utilisation and expenditure patterns in India

In India, a substantial investment has been made in developing community-based programmes, such as Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), and networks of village-level health workers. In spite of these efforts, growth utilisation of government services has failed to keep pace with the private sector, particularly in the past two decades. The results presented in this paper show that Indian families, even poor families, receive most of their medical care from private practitioners. Maternity care is a partial exception here. For most other forms of care, however, the public sector is dwarfed by the reliance on the private sector, even though the quality of private sector providers and services remains highly variable.