News Desk :
Businessman Farhad Hossain never gave a second thought to spending more than Tk 100,000 per day when it came to saving his mother Fatema Rahman’s life after she contracted the coronavirus. The woman did not make it home alive from the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital in Dhaka.
She lost the battle for her life on May 9 after a month of treatment. They were in for another shock: the outrageous medical bills. The family had to pay the ICU bills for 31 days, eight hours and four minutes-around Tk 60,000 per day on an average.
Doing so meant it ate up their savings and they sunk deep into debt. They are struggling now to repay the loans they took to clear the enormous treatment expenses, reports bdnews24.com
“Sometimes we had to spend Tk 100,000 a day only on medicine,” said Farhad, a trader of agricultural products in Thakurgaon.
Financial woes tied to healthcare are nothing new for Bangladeshis and high costs of COVID-19 interventions have only exacerbated problem.
Last August, Fatema’s son-in-law also died from COVID-19. The family have had to shell out Tk 4.5 million in total for the treatment of those two members, they said.
Most people in Bangladesh cannot afford such high healthcare costs of their loved ones. Farhad’s family did: just about. They now plan to sell off their ancestral assets to clear the debt.
Farhad and his brother Fayez Ahmed, who works in Palmal Group of Industries, borrowed heavily from friends and relatives. They still had Tk 700,000 of that money when their mother died.
“Now we’re worried about how we’ll repay the rest of the money we borrowed,” said Farhad.
Not all coronavirus patients need to be hospitalised and spend such a huge amount like Farhad’s family did, say public health experts.
According to the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research or IEDCR, 44 percent of the coronavirus patients were hospitalised from Jan 28 to Apr 15.
The rest of the patients recovered by receiving treatment at home. Those who were hospitalised, however, had to spend a large sum of money for treatment. Patients who remained in general beds spent Tk 125,000 to Tk 250,000 on an average. The bills went up to between Tk 400,000 and Tk 500,000 for patients who needed intensive care.
Medical care in the government hospitals are subsidised, which eases the financial strains on the patients. But for those who turn to private hospitals, by choice or by circumstance, the financial burden becomes huge. Abdullah Al Mamun, a resident of Adabor in Dhaka, saw his entire family contract the coronavirus in the beginning of April.
