The much touted health insurance scheme is no substitute to proper health care and well equipped government hospitals, Community Health Centres (CHCs) and Primary Health Centres (PHCs), as they are the only health care institutions that the poor can afford. To mention the Health Sub-Centres which are closest to the rural habitats would be a travesty because they are very inadequately staffed and do not have the necessary medicines, even ordinary pain killers. Even emergency services cannot be provided by the Sub-Centres. That these issues fail to feature in the state assembly is because MLAs hardly do their homework or are too constituency centric. They would not even bother to find out the total number of health Sub-Centres in Meghalaya and their capacity to deliver. It is this lackadaisical attitude of public representatives that allows governments to get away with non-performance.
The report of the Estimates Committee of the Assembly that the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine kept for better diagnosis of ailments, which was procured in 2012 by the Shillong Civil Hospital has not been functioning and also not repaired due to the high cost is appalling. If a government hospital situated in the heart of the state capital is languishing without an important and modern diagnostic equipment then we can well imagine the kind of health care the rural population are getting. Insurance has pushed most BPL families to look for health care in the private sector. As a result government hospitals are languishing and lack even the basic health care equipments and human resources. Health insurance schemes are by design defective and usually profit the private health care sector. It is time to take a hard look at whether the health insurance scheme is truly an insurance against poor health or whether the public funded hospitals need to be injected with adequate funds and run on a more accountable model. Health care cannot be taken with a “business as usual” attitude.
