Question

Describe health policy. How can health policies be used as regulatory or allocative tools?

Answer 1

HEALTH POLICY: Health Policy is defined as the decisions, plans and actions that are undertaken to achieve specific health care goals for the people of a specific society or country. It also defines a vision for future which in turn helps to establish long and short term targets for the improvemnet of helath in the society. It defines the expected roles and priorities of different groups.

As legislation directly or indirectly impacts the health framework, so health policies are created to influence health achievements and goals by the ease of access and ease of use to medical services.

In short, health policy is the aggregate of principles, stated or unstated and also it characterize the distribution of resources, services and political influences that impact on the health of population.

HEALTH POLICY AS REGULATORY OR ALLOCATIVE TOOLS:-

• REGULATORY HEALTH POLICY:- They are used by government to control and to standardized the types of behaviour of a particular group of the society. The government itself monitor the groups and penalize them when policies are not followed. For example: In hospitals certain standards and policies are made to provide care to the client which are monitored by the government on regular basis.
• ALLOCATIVE HEALTH POLICY:- In this policy the income, services are provided to only one group in the population over the another group to provide medical facilities. For example: Tax imposed on rich people of society is collected by the government and used to provide the medical care and health insurance to the poor section of the society.