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The perceptions of private and public certainly vary considerably from country to country and I think there is no doubt that in China the distinction is less clear cut and absolute than in many EU countries and the US (or perhaps more precisely: In the political rhetoric of the EU and the US).This is, I would think, both a product of a long cultural tradition that makes the family an inherently political entity (and can also place responsibility of one family members actions on the whole family unit) and of more recent developments such as the Work Unit system that, up until a few decades ago, very closely monitored what many in the USA would consider very private aspects of life (including such aspects marriage and pregnancy, with some amount of monitoring still existing today).The Economist recently ran an interesting survey in this regards (Private parts) that was conducted by the Boston Consulting Group.These are the main results:Personally, I found the wide disparity between the attitudes towards children and health particularly interesting.As a final note: While obvious, I think that it is important to remember that the above chart provides averages for multiple billions. There is in my opinion no uniform perception of privacy, not in the US and not among the 1,344 million individual Chinese.

Lets look at two large Healthcare systemsThe UKThe National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system of England. It is the largest and the oldest single-payer healthcare system in the world. It is able to function in the way that it does because it is primarily funded through the general taxation system, in a similar fashion to the funding model for fire departments, police departments, and primary schools. The system provides healthcare to anyone normally legally resident in England, and also any other part of the United Kingdom with almost all services free at the point of use for all such people. The idea of the NHS being free at the point of use is contained in its core principles.An independent survey conducted in 2004 found that users of the NHS often expressed very high levels of satisfaction about their personal experience of the medical services. Of hospital inpatients, 92% said they were satisfied with their treatment; 87% of GP users were satisfied with their GP; 87% of hospital outpatients were satisfied with the service they received; and 70% of Accident and Emergency department users reported being satisfied.The USAHealth care in the United States is provided by many distinct organizations. Health care facilities are largely owned and operated by private sector businesses. Health insurance for public sector employees is primarily provided by the government. 60-65% of healthcare provision and spending comes from programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the Veterans Health Administration. Most of the population under 65 is insured by their or a family member's employer, some buy health insurance on their own, and the remainder are uninsured.Of 17 high-income countries studied by the National Institutes of Health in 2013, the United States was at or near the bottom in infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancies, injuries, homicides, and rates of disability. Together, such issues place the U.S. at the bottom of the list for life expectancy. On average, a U.S. male can be expected to live almost four fewer years than those in the top-ranked country.From above it is clear that a public health service in the UK does better than a private health system in the US. What about India?IndiaHealthcare in India features a universal health care system run by the constituent states and territories of India. Parallel to the public health sector, and indeed more popular than it, is the private medical sector in India.So India has a combination of both and needs to draw the best from both of them and Makarand Sahasrabuddhe has covered plenty of it in his answer.Now from the Planning Commission's 2020 Healthcare vision for India :v/s ChinaThe remarkable success in China in combating disease is due to sustained attention on the health of the young in China, and of public policy backed by resources and social mobilization- While comparing China and India in selected aspects of disease load, demography and public expenditures on health, the record on India may seem mixed compared to the more all round progress made by china. But this should also be seen in the perspective of the larger burden of disease in India compared to china and of the transactional costs of an open and free democracy.From above, we can infer:Need for policy focusA careful analysis of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study focusing on age-specific morbidity during 2000 in ten most common diseases (excluding injuries) shows that sixty percent of morbidity is due to infectious diseases and common tropical diseases, a quarter due to life-style disorders and 13%due to potentially preventable per-natal conditions.A lot of focus has been on Infectious disease and many of these have been controlled significantly in the past decade even aided by external resources like the Gates Foundation & WHO and have very well publicized vaccination programs.The need now is to focus on non-communicable diseases especially diabetes which eventually leads to cardiovascular, kidney, foot & vision problems for which we really do not have adequate human and physical infrastructure including donated organs. Just to give a number, there are some 70 million diabetics currently and another 70-80 million who will get it in the next 5 years in India and plenty will not get diagnosed. The abnormal thyroid prevalence in India is over 8%. These are significant numbers that burden human productivity and have a impact on the national economy. Moreover these are lifestyle related disorders and can be prevented with lifestyle change.The National Program for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes,CVD and Stroke (NPCDCS) program is a good step in that direction but hasn't gone much beyond pilot stage except in Gujrat.Use of technologyAs is also mentioned by Makarand Sahasrabuddhe, the shortage of doctors is an issue. Moreover doctors are unwilling to operate in rural areas. This is where technology can help in a big way.I have worked on oral cancer screening in rural Karnataka (Biocon Foundation) where the community health worker (Trained person but not a doctor) goes house to house collecting data on the phone snapping pictures of lesions in the mouth. The images are transmitted to the urban center directly from the phone where doctors identify high risk patients. Since the government pays the bill for these patients identifying early not just helps the patient but significantly reduces the financial burden on the state which does not have to actually treat cancer but can fix the lesion before it turns to tumor. Also people in the village are not willing to leave their days wage to travel to the city and technology here helps bridge the gap.There are plenty of other such examples that can aid the resource constrained Indian health environment some of which I have detailed here but are by no means exhaustive Pratik Mandrekar's answer to Healthcare in India: How the situation of indian primary health cares and anganwadies can be improved?My current work involves using technology to help diabetes prevention for those who are at risk to get it in the next 5 years and for those who already have it to manage it better. Mobile, Internet and TV are really useful media to reach out to an audience using trained people who might not be doctors especially when it involves lifestyle related problems and that provides the kind of scale that cannot be covered by existing medical & physician infrastructure even if it grows 2-3X.However not enough people are working on these problems. So there is a need for people to work on this."The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" quoted from Jeff Hammerbacher on This Tech Bubble Is DifferentPrivate partnerships & rethinking medical educationThe bulk of non-corporate private entities such as nursing homes are run by doctors and doctors- entrepreneurs and remain unregulated either in terms of facility of competence standards or quality and accountability of practice and sometimes operate without systematic medical records and audits. Medical education has become more expensive and with rapid technological advances in medicine, specialization has more attractive rewards. Indeed the reward expectations of private practice formerly spread out over career long earnings are squeezed into a few years, which becomes possible only by working in hi tech hospital some times run as businesses. The responsibilities of private sector in clinical and preventive public health services were not specified.There has been talk of public private partnerships, but this has yet to take concrete shape by imposing pubic duties on private professionals, wherever there is agreement on explicitly public health outcomes. In fact it has required the Supreme Court to lay down the professional obligations of private doctors in accidents and injuries who used to be refused treatment in case of potential becoming part of a criminal offence.Regulating & integrating with alternative, traditional medicineHealth perceptions play an important part in ensuring sound health outcomes. Some movement is occurring among eminent allopathic doctors trying, for instance, to rework Ayurveda theory in a modem idiom starting from respectful reverse analysis for actual successful contemporary practice of Ayurveda and provide a theoretical frame linking it to contemporary needs. There is evidence from public health campaigns in Tamil Nadu where every seventh person spontaneously expressed a preference for Sidda Medicine. Homeopathy for chronic ailment is widely accepted. The herbal base for Ayurvda medicine widely practiced in the Himalayan belt has down world attention a huge export market remains to be tapped according to the knowledgeable trade sources but the danger of bio-privacy remains and legal enablements should be put in place soon that would fully expand on our rights under the WTO agreements.References are Wikipedia & this 2020 healthcare policy vision doc from the planning commission - http://db.tt/h4XAYLu6

Yes, a recent survey by Indian Psychiatric Society stated that there has been an increase in mental health related cases by 20% post lockdown in India.In my personal experience I have found myself attending to an increased number of patients from all over India and also Indians residing abroad. In fact states like north east from where I hardly use to get cases, have started turning up for mental health consultations. Also people from remote villages in India are taking up consultations either for themselves or their relatives. I would like to describe an experience before I explain why there has been a rise in mental health related cases due to COVID 19 outbreak.A week back I was providing a consultation to someone who reached out to me from a remote location. The reason for the consultation was job stress and anxiety due to financial uncertainty resulting from COVID 19 outbreak. The patient that time was in his village as his parents stayed there, although he works in a city. while I was providing the consultation online, I could hear voices of many people shouting and screaming loudly in the background. After a few seconds of consultation, he interrupts me in the middle and says “madam can i please call you back after sometime as the villagers are chasing me with sticks and I am afraid they might harm me” and he abruptly hangs the call leaving me clueless. After an hour he connects to me again and narrates the situation. He said “I stay in a city and visit my parents once a year. During this lockdown I have come to stay with my parents so that I can take care of them. While I was talking to you I went out on the road as I was not getting connectivity inside my home., the villagers didn't identify me, started shouting at me and asking me to get into the house with the fear that I would spread COVID 19. One of the villagers heard me addressing you as doctor over phone and assumed that I am a COVID 19 infected patient who has entered the village from the city. So he quickly gathered few villagers to chase me out until my father rescued”. He added “these people here are illiterate and make their own rules. they are also adding up to my stress”Reasons why mental health cases have increased in India after COVID 19 outbreak:lot of people who were staying away from home either due to work or studies are back to home now after the lockdown, resulting in limited freedom, constant vigilance and interference of parents, no access to friends or earlier sources of entertainment and suffocation of the monotony.Young unmarried couples who are dating, are now not able to meet or even speak comfortably as they are at home, feeling limitations on their freedom.Spouses who used to manage their space and privacy outside home are now home bound under one roof, feeling suffocated and breached in their privacy.Old and aged people are in a state of fright as mostly old people are getting affected by the infection. hence, they are nagging their family members out of anxiety without even understanding the statistics or the complete information. fear of death, which is very common at this stage, is high.Frequent marital conflict as burden of responsibilities have increased. Now that people don’t have helps at home, equal division of household chores is a great issue especially for housewives. In working couples too marital conflict is seen due to space issue as both are working from home, and not everyone has enough space to take up official calls.Household chores along with children and their responsibilities are taking a toll on many parents especially if they are newborns, toddlers or sick and unwellIncrease in family conflict especially among joint families and families who have many dependents.Increased stress and anxiety among students whose exams have been postponed to uncertainty and whose proposals for higher studies abroad have been rejected due to the COVID 19 outbreak.People having past history of mental health disorders are now relapsing again during these stressful times and also due to unavailability of medications in remote locations.New onset mental health disorders are also being registered everyday after the COVID 19 outbreak, mostly being Anxiety disorders and Panic disorders.Financial crisis is also one of the major reasons of mental health breakdown, especially for people who have had pay cuts, withheld salary, business class people (especially travel and tourism), people who have taken loans and the labour class people depended on daily wages.Last but not the least the trauma faced by the travelers and their families who have been quarantined and people who have been unfortunately infected.having stated the above reasons, there are many other people like the example above of the patient from the village, who have their unique set of problems. so many of them are not even aware of their mental health issues and somehow dealing on their own, while others don’t even have the access, awareness or money to afford a consultation.