Healthcare System Analysis of Australia and India

Healthcare System Analysis of Australia and India
Over many decades, the policy makers are always concerned about the performance of their
health care systems. Many countries are introducing reforms to improve their performance in
the health sector. The best suited way to determine the progress of a country health-wise is to
assess the performance with the help of different criteria (Bowen et al., 2019). These criteria
are common assessment standards for every country’s performance ability to maximize their
population health and increasing the positive health outcomes (Bowen et al., 2019). The
following sections of the paper will research and analyze the healthcare systems and
performance data of two countries with respect to each other, which are Australia and India.
Similarities and differences will be drawn from the data reviewed. The final section of the
paper will discuss the implications for the health funders and policy makers in each country.
Methodology
To assess the performance of the health care system in Australia and India, five criteria will
be used to determine the progress. The criteria include funding system of the health sector,
the governance arrangements of the chosen countries, population health indicators, health
system performance indicators, management of safety and quality in the health system.
Comparison will be drawn between the Australia and India after detailed analysis of these
criteria. The time-period of the data collected for both countries is mapped properly to ensure
minimal gap with the same coverage of population for health interventions or preventative
measures.

Funding
Funding is a critical indicator of the government’s policy on emphasizing and improving the
health systems (Grépin et al., 2017). The percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is a
sub-indicator which can be critically assessed to determine how much a government is
spending on their health sector. The Parliament of India endorsed the National Health Policy
in the year 1983 and recently updated it in 2017 to focus on the emergence of robust health
care system and lower the emergence of the communicable diseases (Chokshi et al., 2016).
However, deep analysis reveals that the majority of the healthcare system in India is managed
by the private healthcare sector. The Government of India funded a health insurance project
called Ayushman Bharat in the year 2018. This project is also known as ‘The National Health
Protection Scheme’ and it aims to provide financial protection to all families earning less than
$ 7,000 per year (Chokshi et al., 2016). The Indian government added over $ 901 Million to
the current funding of the insurance scheme for the year 2019-20 (Raghavan & Rajagopal,
2019). This accounts for $128.182 billion addition of funds to the insurance scheme. The
statistics for 2017-2018 reveals that the Indian government spent over 1.4% of their total
Gross Domestic Production. This expenditure by the Indian government on the health sector
has seen an increase of 0.2% of GDP from the financial year of 2013-2014 (Raghavan &
Rajagopal, 2019).
For Australia, the health care structure in the country is developed, though it is not evenly
distributed owing to the large size of the country. Both the private companies and the
governments from different angle play major roles in providing healthcare services. The
majority of the cost of the allied and primary health care services are covered under the
Medicare insurance scheme. This health insurance scheme is federal government
administered and is a universal single-payer health care scheme covering all the Australian
citizens. This health insurance scheme is funded by a Medicare Levy that the citizens earning

over a certain income. This levy is currently 2% and citizens earning higher incomes have to
pay Medicare levy surcharge. In the year 1999, a private health insurance rebate scheme was
introduced by the Howard government. Under this scheme the government is funding to the
people covered under private health insurance schemes of Medicare. The funding will go up
to 30% of the total premium. The total spending of government for the Medicare health
insurance scheme for the year 2017-18 was around $185 billion. The health expenditure to
GDP ratio for the Australian nation has observed significant growth over the years and for the
year 2016-17, the Australian Government spend over 9.2 % of nation GDP expenditure.
Comparing both the nation’s funding systems, insurance schemes and percentage of GDP
expenditure on health care sectors, the Australian nation is determined to be significantly
ahead in the funding criteria to assess the performance of nation’s health system. India’s
contribution 1.4% percentage of GDP expenditure on health sector is significantly lower than
the Australian statistics, which is 9.2 per cent of the GDP. This amount of funding indicator
for the Indian subcontinent makes it one of the lowest investors in health sectors globally,
lower than even some of the low-income countries.
System Governance Arrangements
System governance arrangements provides insight on how the government is planning to
distribute the responsibility of handling the health sector in the country. The health system
governance are different in India and Australia. Analyzing this criteria helps in understanding
the functional responsibility of governments or authorities in order to improve the health care
services.
The Constitution of India determined the provision of systematic governing arrangements of
health care sector in India. Instead of the central federal government held responsible for the
healthcare, the constitution conditions that the state governments are responsible to improve

the standard of living of the citizens in their respective state. The statement further adds that
the primary aim of the state governments should be to improve public health standards and
increase the level of nutrition amongst the state population. This leads to a huge variation of
the people in different states relying on the private and public sector of health, as the
functioning of the state governments in context to health sector is not uniform. The
population with higher and middle class of individuals rely less on the public healthcare
services. Overall scenario of the population reveals that majority of the population relies or
wants to access private health care services over public due to the poor quality of the latter
sector. The central government intervenes with the National Health Protection Scheme or
‘Ayushman Bharat’.
In Australia, the health care service providing responsibility is more evenly distributed
among the governments of different levels and the public health sector. The governments at
local, state and national are the largest contributors to the health care sector in the country.
The federal government of Australia is currently administering the Medicare insurance
scheme which is available for all the citizens in the country. National Health Policy in
Australia is administered by the federal Minister for Health. The local operations of
ambulance services and public hospitals falling under jurisdiction of particular state or
territory are managed by the government of such levels with the help of agencies such as
Queensland Health. However, it should be noted that political polarization can be observed in
the funding model of the Australian health care sector. The governments play major role in
shaping national healthcare policy instead of the public healthcare service providers.
Comparing the health system governance arrangements of the two countries, it can be
concluded that there is a bold contrast in the functioning of health care system in India and
Australia. In India, the state governments are given greater responsibility to take care of the
health services in their territory and the central federal government has initiated a nation-wide