From: Ketharaman Swaminathan [s.ketharaman@gtm360.com]
Sent: Sunday, 27 September 2020 7:33 PM
To: ‘sunday.times@timesgroup.com’
Subject: Sunday Mailbox
Dear Editor of Sunday Times:
This has reference to the article entitled “Free market is great but not when a patient’s survival depends on it” published in today’s Sunday Times.
I agree with the author Robin David that a pandemic outbreak like Covid-19 is an emergency situation where the patient / buyer is under duress. But, it’s also a situation that puts the hospital / seller under duress. Hospitals incur higher-than-normal costs for medical equipment, consumables, workforce and other inputs that are under severe shortage during these times.
In a capitalism, Government has equal responsibility towards private citizens aka patients and corporate citizens aka hospitals.
Free markets do have a solution for this situation. It’s called Health Insurance. I’m surprised that the author has totally missed it.
Under the current law in India, it’s voluntary for people to buy health insurance. Had the majority of the private citizens with savings – the economic strata referenced in the article – purchased health insurance, we wouldn’t be having the present crisis. It’s unfair for the government to impose price control on corporate citizens in response to an emergency that has been ignored by private citizens.
Instead, if something needs to be done about the present situation, I propose the following solution: The government should make it compulsory for everyone to buy health insurance.
Under the present health insurance system in India, everyone pays the same premium for a given level of coverage. This creates a situation where people with greater financial resources can shell out more premium and buy costlier insurance that pays for greater treatment than people with lower financial resources.
If that’s seen as unfair, then the government can adopt the “Universal Healthcare” system prevalent in Western Europe, where the premium is a fixed percentage of income and the coverage is the same for everyone. The rich pay more, the poor pay less, but both get the same treatment. No longer will human life be measured by bank balance. As an aside and contrary to popular misconception, Europeans don’t get free healthcare in return for income tax but because they pay health insurance premium separately.
Universal Healthcare is widely seen as a system that ensures fairness to both private and corporate citizens. Going by my personal experience with the system in Germany and UK, the “haves” will have some reservations with it. But it’s a good starting point in the pursuit of improving healthcare for everyone while preserving free market principles, which do merit preserving since “Capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others”, as someone once remarked.
Name: Ketharaman Swaminathan
City: Pune, INDIA