EDITORIAL: The prime minister is very rightly proud of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government for extending health insurance facility to the entire population of the province. According to the programme, an annual health insurance cover of Rs1 million each will be provided to approximately six million families of the province, enabling its entire 40 million population to get medical treatment at more than 250 public as well as private hospitals across the country. The PM was also spot on, at the signing ceremony between the KP government and the State Life Insurance Corporation, when he said that providing free medical care was one of the best things that a government could do for its working class people because nothing can push a family below the poverty line as quickly as a serious illness inside it. A lot of times people are forced to sell off the family silver, quite literally, bankrupt themselves and still find out that the whole thing just took too long. Now that people in KP have medical insurance, and it covers pretty much everything including emergencies, maternity services and cancer treatment, hopefully such things will no longer suddenly push families over the edge. All that the government needs to do now is follow this up with provision of quality, and preferably free at least to an extent, education to all children in the province and families will find their most important concerns pretty much taken care of.
To pull off something like this, especially when the KP government was already struggling financially and the coronavirus pandemic had made a bad situation much worse, is no mean achievement. According to KP Health Minister Taimur Saleem Jhagra, the provincial government has put aside Rs18 billion for everybody in all 35 districts, and the six-phase programme would be complete as early as January 2021. Seeing the success of the initiative and everything it can deliver, it is only right that the PM has decided to request the Punjab and Balochistan governments to introduce similar health coverage programmes, which should push PPP-led Sindh to do the same. This exercise will also encourage competition for better service delivery between hospitals and other medical facilities. It was also a smart decision to incentivise the health sector beforehand by allowing duty-free import of medical equipment and announcing reduced prices for the evacuee properties to set up hospitals and educational institutions. When people are assured of payments, and considering that medical requirements of the people seem to only rise, people will be naturally encouraged to establish new hospitals and try to attract a large number of patients and hence make enough profits to keep working and even expanding. That would force all outlets to try and be better than others, put more doctors in good jobs, and in the long run also encourage medical institutions to churn out smarter graduates.
There are indeed very few examples in the world of such government sponsored programmes. Even the US, the biggest economy and the most advanced country in the world, has nothing like this. Only in some of Europe’s welfare states can people go about their business without worrying about paying medical bills or school fees and be assured that the service they will be delivered will be top quality. By putting items like healthcare so high on its priority list, especially in times like the present when even small sums of money are hard to come by, the government is proving that it has a long term pro-people agenda. No doubt times are still tough and the global recession triggered by the pandemic will continue to affect Pakistan’s economy and therefore its politics, but it is something of an assurance that the government’s direction is right. From containing the spread of the virus through innovative smart lockdowns to opening the economy at the right time to recording a record jump in export earnings and remittances, the government has much to be happy about as well. All it needs to do now is keeping taking more steps, no matter how small or slow at certain times, in this direction.
The government’s prime responsibility is to take care of its people. Yet for the longest time successive governments and people who ran them put their interests ahead of the country’s and the people’s. And things went on this way for so long that everybody eventually got used to it. Pakistan became a place where politicians, already rich in land and wealth, grew yet richer and went abroad whenever somebody in their families was sick while ordinary people were left with whatever care broken down government hospitals provided them. Now the government is taking the lead in making sure that the common man gets quality treatment for free. Steps like these not only make the country better but can also do wonders at the time of the next vote.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020