Hyderabad: Amidst widespread hopes among public health policy experts and state governments that the Centre will make good on the headline ‘Healthcare takes centre stage, finally!’ in the Economic Survey 2020-21, released on Friday, it has been pointed out that some of the language the report employs is alarming.
It is worrisome that the Economic Survey repeats the phrase “healthcare policy must not become beholden to ‘saliency bias’,” according to Dr Ranga Reddy Burri, president of Infection Control Academy of India.
This phrase, he said, and the further explanation “where policy over-weights a recent phenomenon that may represent a six sigma event that may not repeat in an identical fashion in the future” is really alarming.
‘Six sigma event’ refers to an extremely rare happening, and saliency bias is the tendency to focus on prominent items.
“If the policy is going to be centred around this thinking and Budget allocations are made…