Is healthcare a burden in India?
May be, that’s the case going by the existing pricing and healthcare plans across the country’s hospitals.
A recent survey has found a huge difference of healthcare pricing packages between private and public hospitals despite the national health scheme ‘Ayushman Bharat’.
While a total of 18,500 hospitals have enrolled under the scheme, 54 percent of them are private hospitals servicing and the remaining are public hospitals.
Despite this enrolment across different states, the cost of basic neonatal care in private hospitals is two times the pricing in public hospitals. Whereas, critical neonatal care is three times more!
Private hospitals are servicing over 60 percent of the scheme beneficiaries in the country, with
50 lakh admissions registered within one year of its launch.
High Time for Cost Regulation
The Ayushman Bharat scheme envisages free annual insurance cover of RS. 5 lakh per family to over 50 crore people from 10.74 crore poor and vulnerable families.
The higher involvement of private hospitals makes it more important for the government to regulate pricing packages.
According to the analysis, expensiveness in private hospitals is mostly because of higher average stay costs, special and costlier packages. Whereas, public hospitals preferred basic packages.
The median length of stay for basic neonatal care was six days in public hospitals compared to 9 days in private hospitals. Whereas for critical neonatal care, that was 8 days in public hospitals and 12.5 days in private hospitals.
According to officials, public hospitals mostly block the basic packages priced at Rs. 500/day, while private hospitals are giving an extra under intensive, advanced and critical neonatal cases priced
Rs. 3,000-7,000.
There is also a disparity among states in distribution of packages. The average pre-authorization charges in Jharkhand and Meghalaya was found to be twice of that in Chhattisgarh, MP and Gujarat.
The analysis reports better infrastructure, expertise and availability of staff in private hospitals compared to public ones.
An in-depth audits and investigations will be required to understand significant gaps between public and private hospitals, add the officials.
