Besides, for any improvement in health status to be sustainable, the social and economic conditions of the population must be improved to a minimum threshold level. Even before scientific medicine discovered drugs to cure many of the ailments, these were effectively tackled by developed countries through public health measures and by improving the general living standards. In contrast, the contribution of curative medical care inimproving people's health status is very little. In this perspective, CEHAT has correctly identified public health and socio-economic intervention as the primary need for tackling our health problems. CEHAT's studies also bring out that the total size of health care services in the country is large enough to make it universally accessible to all the resident Indians.

However, the distribution of such services is lopsided and the real underdevelopment in health care relates to government services. While the overall doctor population ratio in the country is comfortable at 1 doctor for 889 persons, at primary health centres the ratio is abysmal at 1 doctor for 24,938 persons. Besides concentrating on public health and improvement of living conditions of people, government policy must address the problems of administration and distribution of public health care services.