Editorial
Public medicare cost enhanced
Who will take care of poor patients?
TO a great majority of the people who avail medical service of public hospitals and health centres, the government decision to increase charges of certain services provided by them cannot come as welcome news. Public hospitals are supposed to provide free service or at best on cost basis in terms of certain facilities or at nominal costs. In reality, things are different.
The enhancement will no doubt put the very poor at a great disadvantage. The immediate impact has been discernable with some patients reportedly choosing to leave hospital, being no longer able to afford to pay the cost of hospital treatment. One would recall that such a plan was dropped in 2005, and rightly so.
We understand that not all charges have been increased but glancing through the list prices of a few specialist services like pathological and imaging tests, indispensable for specialist treatment, could well have been left untouched. In some cases charges have been enhanced by more than 50 percent, which appears to be unreasonable.
We find it hard to accept the health minister's rationale for imposition of 'user fee' recommended in the draft health policy that this would increase access to health service for people. On the contrary, we feel that this would deprive the poor of their right to health which is guaranteed by the constitution, and may also be looked upon as commercialising public healthcare system.
It is a weak argument too that increased revenue would enhance the quality of service. It is facile to talk about improving the quality of service that would leave out a large chunk of people from its ambit. It is the government's obligation to ensure that every citizen, especially the poor and the marginalised, has access to affordable health care system.
Our healthcare system, experts aver, on the whole has been a neglected sector and with the onset of many new diseases in the country health service needs to be geared up and made available without necessarily taxing the pocket of the poor. For a country like ours the health sector of necessity will have to be heavily subsidised, or else, as experts claim, it would be difficult to meet the millennium development goals.
It would be thus our hope that the government would reassess the issue while at the same time address the management of public hospitals and healthcare centres both in the cities as well as in the villages and outlying areas, which, needless to say, are in a poor state.
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