Why Kenyans Are Flying Out For Medical Services

Health service pricing has become a free-for-all in Kenya, costing thousands of lives as doctors charge up to 10 times what is recommended by the government.

This price inflation is mainly attributed to failure to enforce pricing regulations and the concentration of policy initiatives on increasing healthcare provision through pay-as-you-go system.

As a result, Kenyans have been left with some of the most expensive treatments in Africa that have kept life-saving procedures beyond the reach of the majority.

Medical insurers say the departure from regulated pricing and a lack of policy enforcement, has seen the price guideline issued by the Medical Practitioners Board rendered close to moribund.

The source of the problem, say analysts, is the health sector’s move to cost-sharing, which is seeing public and private hospitals alike move to entirely unregulated prices.

The resulting

Cost of surgery in Kenya is now so high that doctors easily recoup the cost of their entire training after they perform a handful of surgeries on specific conditions.

For doctors attached to larger hospitals, such surgeries can happen in less than six months. “What is happening in Kenya is tragic,” says Dr Edward Rukwaro, AAR’s general manager for Healthcare and Groupcare who traces the problem back to the introduction of cost sharing in public hospitals that was accompanied by little investment in the facilities to improve the quality of services.

The result, he says, was overwhelming demand for medical services from private providers that culminated in runaway inflation of the cost of medical services.

Over the past five years that the economy has been growing, the government has increased its investment in public hospitals. But this is yet to impact on costs because many users are stuck with private providers where demand still outruns supply.

Many users of health services believe that the cost of medical services, as in all sectors of the economy, are unlikely to come down.

Insurance companies accuse the regulatory authorities of failing to curb runaway inflation in the medical services sector for the cost burden that patients currently bear.

But doctors and private service providers say the real cost drivers are the systemic and policy oriented. They give the example of India where a proactive government policy on generics has significantly reduced the cost of drugs.

Source: bdafrica.com Contributed by: DMSMedwire Research JSG Team