A cost tag can tamper care: Take care of healthcare

If a country decides to provide ‘Quality Healthcare Completely Free of Charge to All’, then how would you consider this act – is it an act of charity or an act of humanitarian concern or favour? To me, healthcare is the fundamental right of every citizen in the world. Hence, providing access to quality healthcare for all, irrespective of their status and symbol, is but granting everyone their right to health – nothing more, nothing less. 

As an institution that is working in the field of healthcare, and providing quality healthcare with advanced medical facilities, absolutely free of charge to all, across 43 medical hubs that are offering different levels of medical care like – single-speciality tertiary care, multi-speciality tertiary care, secondary care, primary care and outreach services, we have successfully provided outpatient services to more than 3 million people and inpatient services including paediatric cardiac surgeries and mother and child specialised services to more than a lakh patients, over the last 12 years. 

With this experience, I can vouch for the fact that the lives saved in our hospitals wouldn’t have otherwise survived if they had had to pay and procure healthcare. More than 80 per cent of our patients come from difficult backgrounds, not having two pennies to rub together. The conditions that they come with may require a long stay, including cases that were nurtured in the ICU for more than 100 days, and given the best possible care, all for free. 

Can a country afford to lose its precious human capital, in disease and death, by commercialising healthcare and constricting the services only to those who can fend for themselves? Are we ready to turn a blind eye to the majority who are falling through the cracks due to huge out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare, or to those who simply resign to their state of inability and await their due date? 

While, on one side of the radar, healthcare is not reaching all due to mounting costs, on the other side, the number of qualified doctors available to treat patients, especially in rural areas, is showing a grave picture. India has achieved the WHO norm of 1:1,000 doctor population ratio. As of August 2024, it has been estimated that the ratio is 1:836 in India, which looks better than the WHO standard. Yet, there is a severe shortfall of doctors in rural areas.

Where are our doctors coming from, and what is happening in the zone of medical education? In India, medical education is an elite affair. The cost to acquire medical education ranges from a few thousand to several crores, depending on whether it is a Government or Private medical college. The competition to get into Government medical colleges, which have a low fee structure, is tremendously high. Although there is a rural quota fixed for enabling rural students to get through NEET, yet the possibility of rural students acquiring a good NEET coaching is itself a big challenge. 

Rural areas account for 70 per cent of India’s population but are served by just 34 per cent of the country’s doctors.  Nearly 80 per cent of the required specialists are unavailable in rural Community Health Centres. The lives of India’s poorest households are, on average, 7.6 years shorter than that of its richest 20 per cent households. 

Hence, the expansion of healthcare to all for free should be complemented with providing medical education to all, especially the rural youth, for free. The World Health Organisation has recommended that a rural background should be considered as a priority for admission into medical colleges. The National Medical Commission has stated that we need to ensure the availability of adequate and high-quality medical professionals in all parts of the country. The National Health Policy 2017 recommends integrating medical professionals with the service delivery system in a real environment. 

While the policies of the polities are plausible and are aligning with the best interests of the nation, these will remain utopic until we take the bold step to completely untether healthcare and health education from the strangulating knots of commerce. 

Treading the highway of commercial healthcare unscrupulously would one day lead to a deadlock, where the country would have lost much than it gained through the healthcare industry. 

Hence, it is time to reverse the gears and gather goodness to globalise free healthcare and free health education for all this World Health Day.