MASSIVE HOSPITAL BILL SHOCKS INDIA
▶ Father charged for 2,700 pairs of gloves, 600 syringes and more after his daughter was treated for 15 days
A private Indian hospital has come under scrutiny after the parents of a young dengue fever victim went public with complaints about the handling of her case.
Then there was the huge bill presented to them for 15 days of treatment, after which their daughter died, including charges for 2,700 pairs of medical gloves.
Adya Singh, 7, died in September after being treated for 15 days at the Fortis Hospital in Gurugram near Delhi, a branch of a nationwide, privately owned chain of hospitals.
The girl’s father was issued a 20page itemised bill amounting to 1.8 million rupees (Dh102,000). The bill provoked an uproar after one of the father’s friends posted it on Twitter last week.
Apart from the 2,700 pairs of gloves, it included 660 syringes and charges of 200 rupees each for blood sugar test strips that are listed at 13 rupees apiece on the hospital’s website.
The health minister, J P Nadda, said he had asked the hospital for the medical report of the case, while the national pharmaceutical pricing authority demanded copies of the bills presented to the family.
“It was a very unfortunate incident,” Mr Nadda said. “We will look into it. If required, action will be taken.”
Jayant Singh said his daughter was unnecessarily kept on a ventilator and a dialysis machine for all 15 days, and that less expensive drugs were swapped for more expensive brands.
After a scan taken two weeks into her stay confirmed that Adya had suffered damage to 80 per cent of her brain, the doctors suggested a new blood plasma transplant procedure which would have cost between 1.5m and 2m rupees, he said.
“My first question was, why perform the procedure? Will it help her?” Mr Singh said. “With 80 per cent brain damage, what would her life be like? The doctors said they could save the other organs.”
When Adya’s family decided to take her home, the hospital made Mr Singh sign a form declaring that the patient was leaving against medical advice.
He said this was done to ensure that Adya’s death, which happened just minutes after she was taken off the ventilator, could not being registered as occurring under hospital care. That would have raised its official mortality rate.
Mr Singh had to hire an ambulance from elsewhere to take his daughter home. The final straw, he wrote in a Facebook post, was the hospital billing him for the disposable gown his daughter had worn and for the sheet in which her body had been wrapped.
Fortis insists Adya was treated according to standard medical guidelines.
“The family was kept informed of the critical condition of the child and the poor prognosis in these situations,” the hospital said.
“Care of ventilated patients in ICU requires a high number of consumables as per globally accepted infection control protocols. All consumables are transparently reflected in records and charged as per actuals.”
Concerns over the costs and practices of private hospitals have grown as more Indians are forced to seek an alternative to government clinics and hospitals that are struggling with inadequate funding and staff.
In August, the government allocated US$20 billion to run its public health programme until 2020 – $5bn less than required, its own statistics showed.
And while the government plans to increase healthcare spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP from 1.4 per cent, this is still far lower than the global average of about 10 per cent.
At the same time, India is not able to regulate private hospitals enough, resulting in rising costs and unnecessary medical interventions, according to Arun Gadre and Abhay Shukla, doctors who wrote about India’s health system in their 2016 book Dissenting Diagnosis.
Two out of every three hospital admissions are now to private hospitals, and the cost doubled between 2000 and 2014.
The medical profession in India, Dr Gadre and Dr Shukla wrote, was first transformed “into a market-driven commodity, and then into a corporate-led, profiteering industry”.