Patients face harassment at ESIC’s tie-up hospitals in Odisha

ROURKELA: Insured persons under Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) and their dependents continue to face harassment and humiliation at private hospitals empanelled with ESIC to provide super-speciality treatment to beneficiaries. Reason: Outstanding dues of member hospitals are piling up since 2015 making it difficult to function.

As per reports, the ESIC Model Hospital at Rourkela, which has highest number of insured persons in the State, has tie-up with Purnima Nursing Home, Om Apollo Hospital, Shanti Memorial Hospital, Kalinga Trauma Centre, Super Speciality Hospital and Ispat General Hospital (IGH) for obstetrics and gynaecology, orthopaedic and endoscopy cases among other things. Similarly, the Gayatri Clinic and Sriya X-Ray are empanelled for ultra sound examination and digital X-ray respectively.

Sources said while combined dues of these health centres have mounted to about `50 lakh, the CWS Hospital with dues of about `15 lakh had snapped its ties with ESIC in November 2017. These hospitals are allegedly ill-treating the ESIC patients.

At Bhubaneswar, Model Hospital has tie-up with Aditya Care Hospital, Sparsh Hospital, AMRI Hospital, Vivekananda Hospital, KIIMS Hospital, Panda Curie Cancer Hospital and Hi-Tech Medical College and Hospital. Their combined dues are between `8 and `10 crore with the share of Aditya Care alone being about `4  crore. SUM Hospital, with dues of `60-70 lakh, has snapped its ties with ESIC.  

An ESIC beneficiary, Pravati Patnaik, said for ultra sound test she had to wait for two days at Gayatri Clinic as it had fixed to conduct only 10 tests of ESIC per day, adding that patients of ESIC were ill-treated and many patients returned without test.

Sources said bills of private hospitals are ‘deliberately’ kept pending by unscrupulous officials and in some cases, original medicine wrappers and bills are removed from files to hold payments. Odisha unit CITU vice-president Jehangir Ali echoed similar views and said bills of private hospitals are not cleared for pecuniary gains. In some cases, private hospitals also resort to unfair practice by giving low cost medicines and injections to gullible poor patients, but sending whopping bills of standard medicines, he added.
He demanded a probe into the whole affair of Model Hospital.

Newly appointed Medical Superintendent of Model Hospital Kayam Singh said harassment of insured persons and their dependents is not acceptable and issues with the member hospitals would be sorted out.