- It is necessary to make a regulator for the healthcare sector
Mumbai: Prakash Chandra Kandpal, Managing Director and CEO of SBI General Insurance Company Ltd., a leading company in the general insurance industry, says that to remove the shortage of doctors in the country, to make treatment accessible to all, medical In order to make education affordable and make health insurance affordable to the general public, it has to be made effective by making sweeping changes in the healthcare ecosystem.
Although the Government of India is making meaningful efforts in this direction by building new medical colleges and taking important steps like ‘Ayushman Bharat’, but the concerted cooperation of all the stakeholders is necessary, not the government alone. These various issues related to the healthcare sector were discussed in detail by commerce editor Vishnu Bhardwaj with insurance and banking veteran PC Kandpal. Here are the highlights of the discussion:-
What steps needs to be taken by the government to make the treatment affordable and build a healthcare ecosystem in the country?
See, along with bread, cloth, house, education and health care is also the basic need of every citizen. Today both education and health facilities are expensive. For this reason all the problems have arisen in the healthcare sector. Our children want to become doctors, but education is too expensive. That’s when medical students are forced to take risks and move away from homeland to Ukraine and other countries. Treatment is also becoming more expensive in the country. This is why the cost of health insurance is increasing. Therefore, to overcome all the problems, an ecosystem will have to be created by taking all the stakeholders of the healthcare sector together. In which the treatment cost of everything has to be tracked. It will be mandatory for private hospitals to treat the original disease of the patient and not to do unnecessary treatment to increase the bill. Along with this, health insurance should be given to everyone by giving awareness and encouragement. For this, the government will first have to constitute a separate regulator for the healthcare sector and reduce medical education fees.
read also
Today medical education in India is very expensive. How can it be possible to make it cheaper?
Absolutely possible. To make medical education affordable, we have to bring revolution like engineering education. Just as there was a shortage of engineering colleges till 20 years ago, it was also expensive, but later when many engineering colleges were opened, engineering education became cheap and the shortage of engineers in the country was also removed.
Can the corporate sector support this work through CSR expenditure?
Sure can. In the last 7 years, the corporate sector has spent about Rs 1 lakh crore on Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR). Out of this, if the government makes 50% i.e. 50 thousand crore rupees mandatory for healthcare, a new revolution will come in the sector and the health expenditure of the government will also be reduced. If it is made mandatory to open a dispensary in every village by constructing a large number of new medical colleges with this money, then along with employment, basic medical facilities will be available to the rural people. Today, even a financially weak family cannot afford such expensive medical education to their child. It should be made mandatory for every company to bear the cost of MBBS education of a student who has scored more than 50% marks in NEET exam, then one lakh MBBS can be prepared in the next 5 years. , whose appointments can be made in more than 66 thousand blocks of 6.49 lakh villages of the country.