Healthcare and education very expensive

As per a report published in a leading Bangla daily, we find that the financial burden of education and healthcare is increasingly becoming unsustainable. According to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics' (BBS) Income-Expenditure Survey of 2016, individuals taking loans to pay for education and healthcare comprised 6.3 percent (of total loans taken) in 2010. In 2016, that percentage had increased to 10.16 percent, an increase of about 61 percent. Interestingly, these loans were taken out as business, agriculture and industrial loans. This phenomenon has resulted in an increase of loan-taking nationally by 35 percent over the 2010-2016 period and as pointed out by the World Health Organisation (WHO), it is the individual, and not the state, who bears 67 percent of healthcare costs.

Obviously things cannot go on as they are for much longer. The government is spending millions of taka in its attempt to provide primary healthcare. While huge sums are being spent on building infrastructure and medical equipment, we have seen and repeatedly reported in this paper that much less is expended on medical staff, which forces the general populace to resort to private medical treatment. In the field of education, we have public universities with a limited number of seats available. The demand for education has been on the rise over the decades but public educational institutions have not kept up with growing demand. It has given rise to a private sector in higher education which is many times more expensive than their public counterpart.

The government needs to rethink its investments in public health and education. It also needs to work on policy measures that would control the price of medication, penalise the culture of doctors prescribing too much medication and multiple tests at private diagnostic centres and put a stop to the unjustified fee structure in private universities.