Abstract:

India is a country with huge population, and with that the problem of health care in India is also vast. India spends almost 1.23% of their GDP in healthcare, but there remain many differences in quality between rural and urban areas as well as between public and private health care system. The gap between rural and urban health care system is large where in rural areas there is shortage of proper medical facilities like medicine, doctor etc. Also the disparities between private health care system and private health care system dividend. The public health care system lacks in manifold such as deficient infrastructure, deficit manpower, equivocal quality of services etc. Whereas the condition of private health services in India is good and provide good facilities to patients but in this we have expensive health services. Almost 75% of healthcare expenditure comes from the pockets of households. In this back drop, this study try to investigate the patterns of healthcare expenditure in India from household perspective. The study is based on secondary data collected from NSS 75th Round data on Key Indicators of Social Consumption in India: Health. The pattern of healthcare expenditure is studied using tabular and graphical representation. Also, to investigate the status of disparity between rural and urban areas t test is used. The result signifies that the cost of treatment for hospitalised treatment both for rural and urban areas, cancer consumes highest level of expense.   In terms of hospitalized treatment, there are various categories of expenditure like doctor’s fee, medicines, diagnostic tests etc. In both rural and urban areas, the expense on medicine is more in public hospitals while in private hospitals  package component has highest share of expenses. The t-test result confirmed that there is significant difference between the medical expenditure pattern of rural and urban areas.

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