68% report high treatment costs, 56% flag costly ICU, room charges in private hospitals: Survey

More than six in 10 families who used private hospital services in the last three years reported issues with their bills, with many saying they were charged excessively for treatment, diagnostic tests and hospital facilities, according to a LocalCircles survey.

The survey, which received 23,084 responses from citizens across 306 districts, found that 68% of respondents cited “excessively high prices of treatment” as an issue. Another 63% said they faced “excessively high prices of tests”.

High treatment, test and hospital facility charges

Around 56% of respondents reported “excessively high charges of facilities like ICU and/or room”, while 51% said they were charged “excessively high prices of medicines and consumables”.

Nearly half of those surveyed, or 49%, said their bills included “unnecessary doctor consultation charges”. Another 43% reported “excessively high doctor consultation charges”.

The survey also found that 40% of respondents reported “over billing of quantity of medicines and consumables used”, while an equal proportion said they faced “other unexpected or unknown charges”. Only 14% said they had not experienced any such issue with private hospital bills.

The findings come shortly after the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare raised concerns over the affordability of private healthcare.

The committee, in its 176th Report on “Affordability and Accessibility of Healthcare Facilities in Public and Private Sector”, tabled in Parliament on August 7, flagged opaque billing, unnecessary diagnostics and wide variations in charges for the same procedures at private hospitals.

The committee recommended an immediate mechanism to standardise and cap the costs of essential treatments, diagnostic tests and routine procedures across private hospitals. It also called for mandatory price transparency before admission and a unified, fast-track grievance redressal ombudsman to deal with excessive billing and insurance claim disputes.

The report cited data from the 80th round of the National Sample Survey for January-December 2025, which showed that the average cost of hospitalisation was ₹6,631 at a government hospital compared with ₹50,508 at a private hospital — nearly eight times higher.

Panel flags opaque billing, calls for price caps

For childbirth, the average out-of-pocket expenditure was ₹37,630 at a private hospital, compared with ₹2,299 at a public facility.

The parliamentary panel also noted that out-of-pocket expenditure accounted for 43.4% of total health expenditure in 2022-23. It recommended bringing this figure below 30% and called for a legally binding framework to standardise rates for common medical procedures and diagnostic tests across private healthcare providers.