(LiveMint)
To effectively implement the government’s ambitious health insurance scheme, touted as ‘Modicare’, the central and state governments need to work together under federal institutions like the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Friday.
Speaking at a post-budget event organized by Open magazine, Jaitley said there is no statutory mechanism at present like the GST Council wherein the centre and the states can coordinate when it comes to expenditure on health, agriculture and social sector, which fall in the concurrent list with both states and the centre having legislative powers over them.
The idea of coordinated action was first mooted by chief economic adviser in the finance ministry Arvind Subramanian in his latest Economic Survey, where he said that the GST Council shows that cooperative federalism is a “technology” for reforms in several other areas.
