Covid has left several Indian families under huge medical debts

THE devastating second wave of the coronavirus pandemic has not just left several families bereaved by loss of their loved ones and thrown scores out of jobs. It has also left many families under burdens of medical debt that they are struggling to repay.

While life is slowly crawling back to normalcy in India which has seen the second-highest tally of people contracting the virus (31.4 million) and the third-highest death numbers (421,382), millions are deeply worried over the huge pile of medical bills that they need to pay now. Most Indians do not have health insurance and high charges of Covid-19 treatment have left them buried in debt.

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People have been found to be borrowing from friends and relatives after exhausting their savings on paying for ambulances and treatment and even bank loans. Worse, many of them are even forced to appeal for help from strangers by pleading online for help on Ketto, an Indian crowdfunding website, Associated Press reported. Some have even gone to the extent of borrowing $50,000 (Rs 37 lakh), a kind of debt they haven’t seen before.

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The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the Indian economy, leaving millions at the mercy of a not-so-strong healthcare system. According to experts, such costs will hurt the country’s economic recovery.

“What we have is a patchwork quilt of incomplete public insurance and a poor public health system. The pandemic has shown just how creaky and unsustainable these two things are,” Vivek Dehejia, an economist who has studied public policy in India, told AFP.

It is not that the pandemic has exposed India’s public health care system for the first time.

Indians generally pay about 63 per cent of their medical expenses from their own pockets. Things have turned worse at a time when people are forced to meet exorbitant expenses for Covid treatment when several millions of jobs have been lost.

Though many jobs returned after the country’s cities lifted the lockdown after months, economists were still worried about the loss of around 12 million salaried positions.

Pandemic has thrown millions out of middle class bracket

The pandemic has seen 32 million Indians going out of the middle-class category, which includes those who earn between $10-$20 (Rs 744-1,489) a day, as per a study by the Pew Research Center, the US, in March. It estimated that the health crisis has added to the number of India’s poor, those whose income is $2 (Rs 148) or less a day, by 75 million.

“If you’re looking at what pushes people into debt or poverty, the top two sources often are out-of-pocket health expenditure and catastrophic costs of treatment,” K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, said.