Unhealthy State: How The Market Ruined Healthcare

A decade has been passed since government took move to draft rules on how privately-run health facilities would operate in the country. And the draft is not ready yet. Isn’t it taking too long? Transparency International, Bangladesh (TIB) paid heed to the matter to explore what’s taking it so long. It found out that lack of political will and vested interests holding this back.

- Reaz Ahmad

Such political disinterest on crucial public health issue is totally unexpected at a time when people are mostly at the mercy of underperforming private hospitals and diagnostic centres. Through a nationwide survey carried out in 2017, TIB found out that patients are often overcharged against poor dispensation of health services. They are deprived financially and often don’t get the kind of health services they deserve. And those who can afford now prefer going abroad for better treatments.

These all stem out from the fact that Bangladesh doesn’t have any effective rules to regulate the sector and it is riddled with graft practices. In a recently released report TIB gave whopping figures of money being illegally transacted for such private health facilities getting licenses and renewals.

TIB picked up as many as 26 registered privately-run health facilities in Dhaka and 90 others from across all divisions of the country as sample, talked to over 700 people that included representatives of all stakeholders including regulators. So this will be really hard to term its survey findings as ‘isolated’ or ‘stray’ incidents. Rather, the sample survey demonstrates how people are routinely being deprived of health services yet after paying hefty prices.