NEWS reports said high disparity exists in delivery of health services in the city between the rich and the poor. A study report by the Centre for Equity and Health Systems at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Control, Bangladesh (icddr,b) and released on in the city on Thursday said more than 94 percent of the health care facilities in the city are private and located in affluent areas. Services from such facilities have to be bought at huge cost, which is not affordable by the poor. This picture of huge inequity showed the utter neglect of the government in arranging treatment facilities for the poor calling for urgent review of the public policy and health delivery system to the city poor. Previously treatment in public hospitals were free of cost but the government is now charging limited fees making easy access of the poor to treatment increasingly difficult.
The study said 35 percent of the city population lives in slums where public health care services are scanty. Health care is part of the people’s basic right but they are not getting enough access to it and the door is rather quickly shrinking. The disclosure of the report that some four million poor in the city become poorer down to poverty line every year for paying health care bills is quite shocking. We believe actions must be taken to reduce expenditure burden for the poor on account of treatment.
The study carried out between 2013 and 2015 shows only one percent of the 1280 health care facilities in the capital are in the public sector, five percent belongs to NGOs and the remaining 96 percent to private sector; which sells health care at higher cost and not affordable by the ordinary people. Another disclosure said for every one lakh persons in the city of seven million, there are 1.4 public health facilities, 13.1 NGO run facilities with a total domination of the health care services by private sector hospitals and clinics. Public hospitals have over 8,881 beds now while the number of beds in private hospitals runs over 19,000; which are located all over the city and particularly concentrated in affluent areas. They run services commercially round the clock while most NGO run facilities get closed in the evening. It appears that the country’s health care facilities have been almost totally commercialized where rich and powerful people have set up hospitals and clinics doing business out of the miseries of the ordinary people.
Private medical facilities are commercialised everywhere. But public money spent on public health sector especially for poor people is not supervised for ensuring service to the people.
