After a lot of criticism from people and a severe reprimand from the Telangana high court, the private hospitals in the state have finally agreed to hand over 50 per cent of their bed capacity to the state government to provide subsidised treatment to the Coronavirus patients.
A decision to this effect was taken at a meeting held by health minister Etala Rajender with the managements of the private hospitals in the state.
According to official sources, the private hospitals would allocate 50 per cent of the beds to the Covid-19 patients, who would be provided with treatment at the charges fixed by the government. The beds would be filled by the medical and health department.
The department would allocate the beds to patients through a specialised application and they would be admitted by the respective hospitals.
The modalities would be worked out by the hospital managements in consultation with the medical and health department director G Srinivasa Rao.
Right from the beginning, the government has been requesting the private hospitals to come forward to provide subsidised treatment to the Covid-19 patients. It had even fixed the charges to be collected by the private hospitals.
But none of the hospitals has been following the government rates and have been charging the patients exorbitantly. There have been hundreds of complaints against these private hospitals to the government and also to the high court.
Though the government served notices on the private hospitals and even cancelled permissions to a couple of big hospitals, the complaints continued to flood the government.
Now, after the intervention of the high court, the private hospitals came a step down and agreed to allocate 50 per cent of their beds to the government.
