Where to go if I fall sick?

The recent onslaught against hospitals and doctors by a frenzied media has scared citizen and left many wondering what to do should they fall seriously ill.

Till the 90s, most belonging to the middle class preferred to seek treatment in government hospitals. In fact private hospitals were hardly in the reckoning as a serious alternative, except perhaps for the ubiquitous family physician.

Government facilities have however in recent years become stretched so far beyond their capacity and caliber that even bureaucrats, the most powerful people in government, nowadays find it inconvenient to seek treatment of any serious type there.

A few months ago, we watched on TV, poor parents from villages around Gorakhpur crying pitifully after losing their infants (around 70 in 2 days) at a government facility. And though we were shocked and angered, what lingered in our memories was the poor infrastructure, lack of facilities and shortage of qualified manpower and lack of oxygen that characterised them.

But why did this decay occur over time? It is obviously because government facilities did not grow to keep pace with increasing demands, both in capacity as well as the increasing complexity of treatment.

Medical facilities such as hospitals cost money to build and run. A team of senior doctors from the Royal College in Edinburgh visiting us recently were shocked to learn that the spending on health in India is around 1.8 % of GDP; it is 9% in their country and around 16% in USA! And since the government was not spending enough, private investors stepped in to create modern state of art medical facilities.

The cameras have now come to focus on private hospitals in Delhi and NCR. And although the lives lost in the recent stories were comparatively small (of one child of Dengue Shock Syndrome who succumbed after intensive life support provided at a highly advanced specialty center, and another of a 22 week fetus who really had little chance of surviving and living a normal life if it had pulled on with long expensive treatment), they have been far more effective in evoking “this could happen to me” feeling in viewers that Gorakhpur perhaps failed to do.

The core issues here in the stories from the private hospitals in NCR was no longer about poor infrastructure, nonfunctioning equipment and facilities or shortage of medical personnel; this time it was the bill that always appear to seem unjustified when the outcome of a patient is adverse and results in death.

I do empathize with my fellow citizen when they shudder at the choices they face should they become seriously ill, seek care in a government facility which may not even guarantee a bed or a steady supply of oxygen, or go to a private center that provides care that match international standards, but costs much money.

Good private health care is unfortunately costly. Adequate health insurance cover seems to have already become a necessity should you want to be treated in them.

Around 80% of health care in India is now provided by the private sector. Before pulling them down, would it not be prudent if the government increased its health facilities to match theirs.

ADEQUATE HEALTH INSURANCE COVER SEEMS TO HAVE ALREADY BECOME A NECESSITY...