What ails India's two-tiered healthcare system? A philosophical enquiry.

ABSTRACT

India’s two-tiered healthcare system (viz the public and private sectors) has been suffering from various ailments, and each sector has been criticised for its own set of deficiencies. Against this backdrop, this article explores whether there is any possible commonality between the two sectors, and suggests that the “common logic”, or common ground, is themodel of biomedicalknowledge, which forms the foundation of both sectors. It is to problems inherent in the “model of biomedical knowledge” that certain gaps in each sector can be traced. It isonly when we have identified the lapses at the root of the structures of each sector that we can plug the gaps in healthcare. The author suggests that it would be best to analyse the gaps through a philosophical enquiry, and to offer a probable solution, turns to the methodologies of care ethicsand feminist standpoint epistemology.