Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being

What Goal 3 asks for

Goal 3 is the broadest of the seventeen goals, and its targets fall into three groups. The first group is unfinished business from an earlier era: cutting maternal deaths to below 70 per 100,000 live births, ending preventable deaths of newborns and children under five, and ending the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and the neglected tropical diseases while combating hepatitis and water-borne disease. The second group reflects how the burden of illness has shifted. It asks countries to cut premature death from non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer by a third, to treat mental health as part of health rather than an adjunct to it, to strengthen prevention and treatment of substance abuse, and to reduce deaths from road traffic injuries.

The third group is about the system rather than any disease. The central target here is universal health coverage: access to quality essential services, safe and affordable essential medicines and vaccines, and financial risk protection, meaning that using health care should not push a household into poverty. Alongside it sit targets on universal access to sexual and reproductive health services and family planning, on reducing deaths and illness from air, water and soil pollution and hazardous chemicals, on tobacco control, on research into medicines and vaccines for diseases that mainly affect developing countries, and on health financing and the recruitment, training and retention of health workers.

Goal 3 in India

The financial risk protection part of Goal 3 is where India's largest single intervention sits. Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana provides health cover of Rs 5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation to roughly 12.37 crore families, about 55 crore people, described by the government as the economically vulnerable bottom 40 per cent of the population. Many states have merged their own health insurance schemes into it. In March 2024 the scheme was extended to about 37 lakh families of ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers and Anganwadi helpers, and from 29 October 2024 to all citizens aged 70 and above regardless of income. As of 30 November 2024 the government reported around 36 crore verified beneficiaries and 8.39 crore authorised hospital admissions.

Insurance covers hospitalisation, which leaves a great deal uncovered: outpatient care, chronic disease management, mental health, palliative care, diagnostics, and the reason people reach hospital late in the first place. That is the territory most health non-profits occupy in India. Typical work includes community health worker programmes and referral support in districts with thin public provision, maternal and newborn care, tuberculosis case-finding and treatment adherence, adolescent and reproductive health, mental health counselling and helplines, care for children with disabilities, and palliative care, which has almost no insurance route. Non-profits also do a large share of the work on stigma-affected conditions where people will not approach a government facility unprompted.