EDITORIAL NOTE

By TIRTHANKAR MUKHERJEE

NATIONAL CHAIRMAN, JUDICIAL COUNCIL & EDITOR, ASIA 🌏 NEWS

The exorbitant billing practices of private hospitals have today crossed the threshold of mere commercial exploitation and entered the domain of systematic financial haemorrhage, ruthlessly bleeding the common citizen who seeks medical care in moments of vulnerability. What ought to be a sanctuary of healing has, in many cases, mutated into a profit-extracting enterprise where the patient becomes a commodity and distress becomes a revenue model.

When a family is compelled to mortgage its modest assets or empty lifelong savings merely to keep a loved one alive for another day, it is not just an economic crisis—it is a civilizational indictment. Hospitals may be privately run, but health is a public trust, and no commercial entity can be permitted to weaponize illness for profiteering. Billing that is inflated, opaque, and wholly disproportionate to actual service rendered is not just unethical; it borders on legal malfeasance.

This editorial is a clarion call: the State cannot remain a passive spectator while ordinary citizens bleed financially under the guise of “premium care.” The time has come for rigorous statutory oversight, transparent billing protocols, mandatory audit mechanisms, and criminal culpability for wilful overcharging.

Healthcare cannot be allowed to evolve into a playground for unchecked commercial ambitions. A nation that cannot safeguard its sick from exploitation has forfeited its moral authority.

India awaits a decisive correction—and it must come now.