Private hospital room rent shouldn't exceed star hotel room tariff, says Parliamentary Committee

If all goes well, the room rents of private hospitals in India's metropolitan cities would soon get an overhaul. The 176th Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare, titled 'Affordability and Accessibility of Healthcare Facilities in Public and Private Sector,' says a private hospital room in a metropolitan city should not cost more than the average tariff of a three-star hotel room in the vicinity. It was recommended as part of a series of measures to make healthcare more affordable and curb out-of-pocket expenditure.

The committee noted that households continue to face significant financial stress while accessing private healthcare, with average out-of-pocket expenditure per hospitalisation episode pegged at Rs 34,064. The report was submitted in the Rajya Sabha and tabled in Lok Sabha on August 7.

Other recommendations by the panel
a) Resident doctor, nursing, disposable consumables, meal and laundry costs may be added to the basic room tariff.
b) All tertiary care hospitals should provide patients with a comprehensive and legally binding upfront cost estimate before starting any complex or prolonged medical intervention.

c) Hospitals should deploy dedicated financial navigators to help patients and their families understand treatment costs, available philanthropic assistance and health assurance limits.
d) Eliminate room-rent-linked inflation models for standard procedures across private hospitals and put in place standardised treatment guidelines and mechanisms to cap arbitrary price variations.

e) Bring in 'Continuum of care' packages that bundle preventive screening, diagnostics, curative treatment and palliative care under a single capped financial umbrella. Financial protection should extend beyond acute treatment and surgery to follow-up, rehabilitation and end-of-life care.
f) For expensive cancer and rare-disease therapies, including immunotherapy, genomic and targeted treatments, create a regulated National or State Healthcare Corpus Fund by pooling CSR (corporate social responsibility) contributions, philanthropic donations and charitable grants.

g) The corpus should be used to subsidise or fully fund high-cost therapies for eligible patients, it said.
h) Psychological counselling, emotional support and patient support groups should be made mandatory.
i) Zero-cost components for approved treatment protocols and capped packages for severe, chronic and terminal diseases in both public and private sectors.

j) On medicines and medical devices, mandatory AMRIT and Jan Aushadhi pharmacies should be established within all hospitals empanelled under Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY.
k) Private empanelled hospitals should also adopt transparent, tender-based procurement and cap mark-ups on life-saving consumables and devices.
l)'Zero-Stockout Policy' in government hospitals, backed by digital inventory systems, to ensure uninterrupted availability of high-value consumables and surgical implants.

m) On health insurance, universal onboarding of private hospitals and healthcare providers onto the National Health Claims Exchange and expedited deployment of the Public Insurance Registry to improve transparency, reduce claim disputes and curb fraudulent billing.
n) Expand healthcare infrastructure beyond urban centres, recommending mobile diagnostic units, hub-and-spoke telehealth services across districts and use of the postal network for transportation of diagnostic samples and essential medicines to remote areas.
o) Strengthen rural and Tier 2 and 3 healthcare infrastructure, encouraging public-private partnership clinics for middle-income populations and promoting domestic manufacturing of medical devices to reduce import dependence and treatment costs.
(With PTI inputs)