A bold step

Himanta Biswa Sarma’s four-week-old government deserves full marks for the bold step taken to rein in on private hospitals, a section of which has been allegedly fleecing patients in the name of Covid treatment.
A bold step

Himanta Biswa Sarma's four-week-old government deserves full marks for the bold step taken to rein in on private hospitals, a section of which has been allegedly fleecing patients in the name of Covid treatment. Sarma's government on Friday fixed rates of private super-speciality and general hospitals for treatment of Covid patients, so that they cannot charge them according to their whims and fancy. The government fixed rates ranging from Rs 4,000 to Rs 15,000 for treatment of Covid patients to ensure no discrepancy in charging patients for healthcare services in private hospitals. The cost fixed by the government includes registration charges, bed and boarding charges, nursing, consultant charges, blood transfusion, oxygen charges, medicine and drugs as a treatment protocol, pathology and radiology test charges, medical procedures, diagnostic tests, bio-medical waste disposal and sanitization, PPE kits, N-95 masks, among others. This announcement has come as a huge relief for hundreds of families across Assam who have been forced to pay through their nose by a section of private hospitals in the name of Covid treatment. The additional cost, however, has to be borne by patients for various high-end investigations and high-end medicines like Remdesivir and Tocilizumab, among others. Moreover, the rates fixed will be applicable for the patients under treatment till they test Covid negative. The most significant part of the decision is that the charges for the treatment of Covid patients should be made known to the public and that it will be monitored by the authorities. There have been large-scale allegations that Covid patients were charged by private hospitals and nursing homes without any rhyme and reason. As was pointed out in this column of this newspaper on Tuesday, in Guwahati, a particular family had to allegedly cough up about Rs 14 lakh to a private hospital for treatment of three Covid-positive persons, all of whom had remained hospitalized on an average for seven to eight days. Taking advantage of the crisis, some private hospitals were also allegedly swindling patients in the name of providing food. In Jorhat, a private hospital had allegedly charged Rs 1,000 for a vegetarian meal and Rs 1,500 for a non-vegetarian meal supplied by the hospital. While the government's decision has been hailed across the state, what the government should probably also do is to compel the private hospitals to refund the additional amount of money they have already collected from the patients since the pandemic broke out.

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