After a long travel during the year-end, most of the family got infections and fell ill. We went to nearby major private hospitals for treatment. All hospital visits except one were during the daytime. Note that these are fully for-profit hospitals, and in Bangalore, consulting charges for doctors at private hospitals start at ₹800 per visit (follow-up visits with the same doctor within three days have no charges). If it's a specialist doctor, then the charge will be ₹1,000 or more. Super-specialists are even costlier. Now, even in small clinics in Bangalore, a doctor’s charge starts from ₹600. If you get admitted, it’s a different ballgame. Sometimes, within a week, you may exhaust your yearly health insurance coverage, as one of my ex-colleagues discovered last year.
Doctor’s charges are just a part of the overall expenditure. Other than restrooms and drinking water, everything is chargeable in these hospitals. The day may not be far when hospitals start charging for drinking water and restroom access as well! One hospital (there may be more; but so far I saw this trend with one hospital) even took a leaf from Uber's playbook and adopted surge pricing. The only difference here is that the surge happens at night. My wife had to undergo an ultrasound scan as her stomach pain wasn’t reducing even after an injection. When I saw the bill at discharge, I was astonished to see how much the ultrasound scan cost. It was exactly double the daytime rate. Note that the hospital has a scanning unit, but since it was nighttime, labor was costly! Fortunately, consultations for emergency doctors at night cost the same as during the daytime!
However, what was even more interesting is the trend in hospitals to outsource their parking needs, with the outsourcing company collecting money from patients who need to park their vehicles. Some hospitals haven’t started this yet, but many have. Charges start hourly, with the first hour costing ₹50. But should hospitals charge parking fees from patients? Isn’t it a facility they should provide without additional charges to their patients? I can understand parking charges in a shopping mall, but does the same logic apply to hospitals?
In Bangalore, space is costly, so when the hospital's parking slots are full, they may need to find additional parking space, which costs money. But shouldn’t that expense be part of the service they provide to their patients? Many hospitals has their own parking (which is quite big), shouldn’t that at least be free of cost?
Sajeev
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