Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal on Thursday in the proposed budget for 2021-22 did not make any significant allocation to the much-talked about health sector. There is no visible plan to turnaround the sector as expected by many.
He proposed Tk 32,731 crore which is less than 1 percent (only 0.95 percent) of the GDP. The World Health Organisation suggests a country to spend at least 5 percent of the GDP on health. The proposed budget is even less than this year's revised budget of 1.02 percent.
“This is unfortunate,” Dr Ashikur Rahman, a senior economist at the Policy Research Institute (PRI), told the Bangladesh Post.
“In 2009, we saw much needed policy as well as fiscal focus on the energy sector and we got the benefit. Such a focus was needed for the health sector. But it’s missing,” he said.
“We missed a chance to fundamentally reform the health sector,” he added.
The health sector’s weakness has been exposed ever since the Covid-19 struck Bangladesh in March 2020. Hospitals were found limping due to lack of adequate diagnostic facilities. Many big hospitals did not even have basic oxygen supply mechanisms at the beginning of the pandemic.
People have been travelling from one place to another to find treatment.
The government has built community clinics in rural areas. But those clinics remained as a basic center with no plan to upgrade those as disease diagnosis as well as treatment facility.
At any given time, people need to travel to Dhaka for a simple surgical procedure or detect any disease. But the pandemic shows the importance of decentralisation of healthcare services with proper infrastructure.
The pandemic also put the health sector on focus since everybody for the first time in the history was talking about health which is otherwise not a priority area.
The finance minister in the proposed budget said in the last 50 years, “especially during the three and a half years of Bangabandhu's rule and the 17 years of visionary leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the size of Bangladesh's economy has increased 271 times and our per capita national income has increased 300 times.”
He said the comprehensive economic recovery plan includes four main strategies –prioritising government spending that creates job, creating loan facilities through commercial banks at subsidised interest rate for the affected industries and businesses so that they can revive their economic activities and maintain competitiveness at home and abroad, expanding the coverage of social safety net programmes to protect the extreme poor and low paid workers of informal sector from the sudden income loss due to the pandemic, and the fourth strategy is to increase money supply to the economy.
Speaking on health, he proposed to allocate Tk 10,000 crore in the next fiscal year to meet the emergency requirements to respond to the pandemic like the previous year.
“Throughout this pandemic, we have seen a crisis in the health sector. This should have been our opportunity to create a dynamic healthcare system. For that, we needed both policy focus and fiscal focus,” Dr Ashikur Rahman said.
“But there is no grand policy agenda in the budget concerning healthcare. We are at a crisis management stage. But this crisis can be turned into an opportunity. We did that in the energy sector in 2009," he said.
“We overhauled the energy sector. There have been real policy focus such as private sector participation, independent power plants, power purchase agreement, indemnity act ….you gave a real policy focus so that the sector can be turnaround…that policy focus is somewhat missing to really turnaround the health sector,” he said.