After the excitement from the courts last week, and the Nobel announcements earlier, this week was rather quiet on the health front. But we took the downtime provided by the lull to engage in a rather important debate, particularly on the heels of the recent scarcity of anti-tuberculosis drugs, about procurement of drugs in the country. While different models exist in the country, variegated by the States’ existing plans to procure drugs in their respective territories, of late the question has been doing the rounds — of centralised procurement in health care. Murali Neelakantan and Ashish Kulkarni argued this week that this was a powerful health idea. They looked at the McDonalds’ model of using a ‘pooled buyer structure’ in procurements.
Many countries and international organisations have shown that a pooled buyer model for drug procurement addresses many issues that are related to price efficiency, stockouts and quality concerns. But for reasons that have remained mysterious for decades, the Central Government chooses to ignore the merits of pooled procurement when it comes to schemes such as the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS), the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (PMJAY) and the Employees’ State Insurance Scheme (ESI),” the authors write. However, private hospitals have realised the benefits of such a pooling arrangement and employed it effectively to cut costs and efforts.
