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Healthcare has got higher allocations in the proposed budget for the fiscal year 2022-23 compared to FY22 but that will not significantly improve the sector, experts say.
Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal on Thursday proposed allocations of Tk 36,863 crore for this sector, which was Tk 32,731 crore in FY22.
Healthcare allocations accounted for 5.2 per cent of the total budget for the current fiscal year while it is 5.4 per cent in the FY23 budget.
Former president of Bangladesh Medical Association Professor
Rashid-E-Mahbub told The Business Post there was no good news for the mass people in the budget, especially the poor who bear the brunt of high out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures.
The finance minister said in his budget speech the government was emphasising how to combat complex pandemic situations like the one experienced during Covid-19.
“To this end, the government is planning to develop the capacity to respond and control such pandemic quickly, conduct research in this sector and develop the institutional capacity, technical knowledge and skilled manpower to up-scale the overall capacity,” he said.
Dr Syed Abdul Hamid, a professor at the Institute of Health Economics under the University of Dhaka, told The Business Post the rise in healthcare allocations in the budget would not be adequate to significantly improve this sector.
“This is because meeting incremental expenditures and tackling inflation will eat up the increase in allocations,” he explained.
He said there was no novelty in the budget other than the maternal voucher scheme’s expansion in some upazilas.
“The total budget size has increased by 14.24 per cent compared to FY22 while the healthcare budget has expanded by 12.62 per cent. The healthcare budget growth is lower than that of the total budget,” Hamid said.
He further said social safety net programmes mainly focus on the poor while poor women in some upazilas are the maternal voucher scheme’s beneficiaries.
“The government should be careful to ensure that the beneficiaries of the two schemes do not overlap.”
The Health Services Division got allocations of Tk 29,282 crore in the proposed budget, which was Tk 25,914 crore in FY22.
Its annual development programme (ADP) got allocations of Tk 15,851 crore, which was Tk 13,014 crore in FY22.
Besides, the Medical Education and Family Welfare Division got allocations of Tk 7,582 crore, up from Tk 6,817 crore in FY22.
