Concerned over the the public sector insurance companies' decision to suspend top hospitals from providing cashless hospitalisation services to policy holders under the mediclaim scheme, a delegation of Association of Hospitals (AOH) will soon meet the insurers to discuss and share their views on the same. The AOH, a body of largest Mumbai-based trust hospitals, held a meeting recently to ponder over the future course of action.

The proposed meeting between the AOH and the insurance companies will focus on reaching a consensus on this matter. The association of hospitals have come up with key points to discuss with the insurers, that may convince the insurers to reassess the current situation.

From July 1, the PSU insurers National Insurance Company, New India Assurance, Oriental Insurance and United India Insurance Company, had taken off about 150 hospitals from their list of preferred provider network (PPN) healthcare companies. The PSU insurers believe that standardised treatment packages in all the hospitals will help in boosting the health care system of the country.

However, most of the hospitals seem to differ on this. According to Dr Pramod Lele, chief executive officer, Hinduja Hospital, "We are very unhappy about the rates decided by the insurers and we expect this problem to be sorted out as soon as possible. Cost of healthcare needs to be looked after in totality and the insurers need to realise that."

He expressed that though the insurers intentions seems to be good, their way of implementing it is not effective, there are loopholes in the present scheme. He pointed out that the rates decided by the insurers are in general and they need draft it after taking the big hospitals into consideration as well. There should have been categorisation of big and small hospitals when deciding the rates, since both of them cater to different set of patients. In fact there is a need to have categorisation in bed rates as well, based on single bed or double bed.

Dr Vijay Krishna, chief executive officer, Breach Candy Hospital expressed that they would be happy to work and collaborate with the insurance regulatory and development authority (IRDA) and other government agencies in this matter. Since, government intervention can help them in dealing with this issue in a more appropriate way. He pointed out that being a private hospital they have a lot of problem that smaller hospitals do not face.

Dr Lele said, "Being a private hospital, we invest crore of rupees on importing machineries from other countries for providing top services to our clients. If we could just get quality machines manufactured in India itself, lot of our problem would be dealt with both economically and otherwise." He urged the government to give incentives to the foreign companies producing machineries to set up there base in India since it will help a lot of hospitals to acquire machineries at a cheaper rates. He expressed that having special economic zones (SEZ) for hospitals is also the need of the hour since it will help in boosting the healthcare sector in a huge way and hinted on having discussions with the government in the nearby future.