Logo

Logo

Privately does it

Mamata Banerjee’s surgical strike on the booming enterprise called “private hospitals” confirms the dominant impression that medical treatment is only…

Privately does it

Mamata Banerjee (PHOTO: Facebook)

Mamata Banerjee’s surgical strike on the booming enterprise called “private hospitals” confirms the dominant impression that medical treatment is only for those who can afford it. This is the worst that can happen in a purportedly welfare state.

As West Bengal’s chief minister, she had to be riveted to the mess within the state; on closer reflection, the problem is said to have assumed endemic proportions across the country. The wider canvas need not detain us here; the view through the Bengal prism can be revolting in itself.

There exists a sharp divide between public and private healthcare, a disconnect in the human development index that can only baffle the sick and the dying. If the affordable state hospitals can be inhumanly negligent when not death traps, treatment and fleecing go hand in hand in the chic private establishments.

Advertisement

Medical insurance and company reimbursement cannot be a fig-leaf or excuse for atrocious charges, as often as not higher than five-star hotels, going by the Chief Minister’s verbal demarche to the heads of leading private hospitals on Wednesday. It is an almost insufferable double whammy as the fiscal distress compounds the physical.

Of course, to earn a profit is the primary factor that determines the functioning of a non-government entity… beyond the ambit of public spending as a concept of welfare. Yet there can be no feeble defence of an ugly truth — inflated bills, lack of transparency, expensive pathological tests that may be unrelated to the illness, and what is quite the most heart-rending — the refusal to release bodies before all the bills are cleared, however inflated.

The Chief Minister has hit the bull’s eye with the diagnosis. Less easily formulated is an effective cure as the canker has over the years permeated the system.

The philosophy that guides healthcare in West Bengal oscillates between the direly mercenary (private hospitals) and the remarkably insensitive (state hospitals). Some of the private entities have even “diversified” operations to the level of crime, specifically the sale of kidneys and babies. The subtext of the Chief Minister’s robust presentation must be that the private healthcare sector is as much responsible for the overwhelming sclerosis.

Equally must it be conceded that the almost exponential expansion of private hospitals is embedded in the progressively decrepit state healthcare mechanism. In both sectors is the patient accorded a relatively minor rating. Not wholly unrelated is the mushroom growth of nursing homes — many of them unregistered — throughout the state. On a limited scale, they showcase the racket that operates in the premier private hospitals… made worse by the lack of equipment and regular attendance by doctors. The malaise is as forbidding as it is disgraceful.

Advertisement