The High Court of Karnataka on Monday initiated a suo motu PIL petition on complaints that COVID-19 positive and other patients were finding it difficult to get admission in hospitals for treatment in Bengaluru city, and that charges fixed for COVID-19 treatment in private hospitals were exorbitant.
A Division Bench comprising Chief Justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka and Justice Nataraj Rangaswamy issued the directions to treat two separate letters, one by the Advocates’ Association, Bengaluru (AAB), and another by city-based advocate P. Anu Chengappa through e-mail to the Chief Justice, as a PIL petition.
In their June 26 letter, AAB president A.P. Ranganatha and general secretary A.S. Gangadharaiah complained that “the package charges prescribed under Government Order dated June 23 was exorbitant and appears as though it was fixed for the benefit of hospitals and not patients.”
“The ceiling was fixed for all hospitals across the board, which means even a normal nursing home which otherwise does not charge high will now charge higher with the government’s prescribed ceiling rates,” the letter claimed, while contending that the State government failed to upgrade facilities in its health centres and hospitals in the last four months.
In her July 4 letter, citing various newspaper reports, Ms. Chengappa said that COVID-19 patients were not being admitted to hospitals though beds were available.
“Non-COVID-19 patients were also being denied treatment for fear of possibility of contracting the infection. Since the last four days, it had become a common grouse for patients to wait for long hours in the hope of being admitted in a hospital, desperately running from one hospital to another in the hope that one of them will be kind enough to admit the patient,” the letter stated.
Expressing concern about the “insensitive” manner in which the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) was dealing with suspected patients and their family members, she pointed out that “the BBMP staff arrive at the home of the patient with blaring sirens and made it a point to create a ruckus in shifting, fumigating and cordoning the area, that the patients and their families are ostracised by the neighbourhood.
“In fact, it is their experience that rather than COVID-19, it is the handling of the situation that is more traumatic, leaving indelible fear and agony all around,” she claimed.