New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has announced plans to make hospitals into an “industry” under the Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme and give a range of sops to private hospitals such as land and funding.
The move follows months of apprehensions by activists that the massive insurance project would likely benefit the private sector and not the public sector.
The government has issued a brief note with broad guidelines for private investments into setting up hospitals in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, for Ayushman Bharat.
In it, the Union health ministry says the government will intervene in the setting up of private hospitals in order to “incentivise it”.
Some of these interventions would include: allotting unencumbered land to private hospitals, providing funding for projects which are deemed unviable by the private sector and speeding up clearances.
In order for the government to provide this funding to private hospitals under ‘Viability Gap Funding’ (VGF), the government also says hospitals would now be classified as an “industry”.
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“Even though there is so much competition in big cities among private hospitals, we already experience their profiteering and loot. Now the Ayushman Bharat scheme will create geographical monopolies for [the] private sector in smaller towns and remote areas,” says Sulakshana Nandi, a public health researcher based in Chhattisgarh.
“On the one hand, the government is unable to regulate the private hospitals that currently exist, and now it will be actively investing in creating more such hospitals,” she says.
However, Alex Thomas of the Association of Healthcare Providers India differs: “This was one of the suggestions made by our organisation, repeatedly to the government. This will definitely encourage doctor-investors and others to consider setting up hospitals, and contribute towards the success of Ayushman Bharat.”
He says that private hospitals should be allowed to do much more than just treat patients under the Ayushman Bharat scheme. “For these hospitals to be viable, they should be also allowed to treat other patients, since rates for most procedures under Ayushman are below cost.”