Fakshay Paruthi
Lamar Alexander once quoted that:
“I think we do better as a country when we go step by step toward a goal, and the goal in this case should be reducing healthcare costs”.
In recent times, healthcare costs have been observed to have a rapid rise. Even a small check-up now lays a burden on a middle-class family. The progress in medicine might have discovered cures for many life-threatening diseases but what has become more frightening than the disease itself is the price to be paid to get cured of that disease.
Public hospitals have been found to be inefficient due to lack of sufficient resources. Sometimes the doctor’s prescription is not available in the free-of-cost chemist shop in the government hospital. The same prescription might cost too much to be bought by an average person from the outside shops where the medicine might be available.
According to a report in 2019, 69.8% of total patient care is being done in the private medical sector whose main motive is to earn profits thus increasing the cost of the procedures. This is because of the underdevelopment of public hospitals in India. Many of the hospitals are not equipped with the necessary modern and advanced machines required to perform highly intensive operations due to which the patients have no choice but to divert to the costly procedures offered by the private hospitals.
One of the main factors in the high inflation (currently to be expected to be around 15% in India) in the cost of these procedures is that the machines required to provide necessary treatment to the patients are costly and their maintenance costs a ton, ultimately coming from the patient’s pockets.
Another factor leading to the high costs is the nature of the disease. If the person is suffering from a serious disease like cancer, it will involve many expensive tests before the operations adding quite an amount to the bills. Most developing countries lack the availability of modern drugs needed to cure fatal diseases and importing them from another country is not cheap and many are not able to afford such treatment.
Due to the high inequality gap in the income level, the rich can pay for expensive medical procedures which encourages private hospitals to earn maximum profits and fill their pockets also making them unwilling in reducing the costs for others.
Insurance has been found to be somewhat helpful in these circumstances of very costly bills but the main problem will not end till private conglomerates are too greedy and the public hospitals are lacking in advanced technological medical tools.