Cost-Adjusted Preference for Ayush Healthcare Systems in North-East India: Utilisation-Expenditure Trade-off Across Ailments

The increasing fiscal burden on healthcare systems has strengthened the need to analyse healthcare utilisation in terms of economic efficiency. Both conventional biomedical care and traditional systems coexist in the pluralistic healthcare systems in India. Traditional and complementary healthcare systems are institutionalised under AYUSH systems in India. Despite the escalating utilisation of AYUSH services, limited empirical findings exist on its cost-adjusted utilisation efficiency across different ailments and diseases. Attempting to bridge this gap, this study creates a Cost-Adjusted Preference Index (CAPI) to evaluate the relationship between preference of utilisation and treatment cost across different AYUSH systems and diseases in North-East India. For this study, the NSS 79th round data set was used. Preference share (proxy for demand) and Cost intensity (proxy for price) are used to develop CAPI. Results exhibit that Unani has the highest mean CAPI, which indicates significant demand relative to expenditure in distinct ailments sectors like dental, gastrointestinal, cosmetic, etc. Ayurveda captured the largest share of AYUSH utilisation with moderate cost-adjusted performance. Whereas, Yoga and Naturopathy account for relatively higher cost-adjusted efficiency than Ayurveda. This CAPI framework gives a novel health-economic tool to analyse demand-cost coherence and may assist policy efforts for escalating allocative efficiency and fostering universal health coverage goals.