A woman who tried to end her life because of financial struggles got slapped with a hospital medical bill amounting to Rs. 4 Lakhs. It was later reported by her father that she had tried to kill herself due to financial constraints. He found her hanging from the ceiling fan on the 10th of December and discovered a note on the bedside table where she explained her disturbance over the family’s poor financial status.
The woman’s family, with the help of the neighbours in their area, took her to the government hospital for treatment first. There they had to face a delay in treatment and therefore, they decided to shift her to a private hospital in the South Delhi region.Â
The family was asked to deposit 75,000 initially and then another 10,000 later. They managed to deposit the money by means of borrowing and other sources. However, the total medical bill totalled around 4 lakhs and the family underwent deep stress regarding the arrangement of such a huge amount of money.
The family has requested the doctors and the concerned hospital staff to look into their situation and give them some relaxation on the total money to be paid. The doctors seem to be understanding their situation and are consoling the family, but no one has come forward with a solution so far.
The woman is conscious as of now but is under deep stress understanding the financial burden that has fallen upon the family. She requests to get discharged every now and then.
Cases of Medical Debt in India
K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India once said that if someone is looking for a cause that pushes people into debt or poverty, the top two sources are often those spent on health expenditure and those on the catastrophic costs of treatment.
The country has recently experienced the Covid 19 pandemic, and only a fool can turn blind eye to the huge amount of medical debts it has put the middle-class population of the country into. Some hospitals and nursing home facilities refused to give the dead bodies for last rites, due to non-payment of bills. A major part of the population had to resort to borrowing, seeking help, or even sale of properties to pay for the medical facilities in a hospital.Â
The pandemic might have exposed the rather expensive and incompetent medical condition in India, the situation however was not specific to pandemic months. According to the 77th round of the All India Debt and Investment Survey, medical treatment alone formed 11.9% and 12.7% of the total household debt in rural and urban areas respectively.
Health Insurance Scheme
In the year 2018, a health insurance scheme was launched by Pradhan Mantri Narendra Modi, with the intention to cover around 500 million of India’s 1.3 billion people and would be a major relief to medical costs in the country. However, the scheme was proven not to be as effective as expected. The execution of the scheme also proved ineffective because different states implemented it differently. The scheme failed to cover the outpatient costs and other primary costs that comprise a major part of the medical expenditure.
