MONEY MATTERS IN HEALTH & TECH : Is it fair for govt to set price limit for private health facilities?

What you need to know:

  • These are categorised into those that are non-for-profit and those purely for-profit.
  • This category of the non-for-profit private health facilities is comprised of facilities owned by religious institutions e.g mission hospitals, dispensaries and NGOs.

Private health facilities in Tanzania have been in existence for a long time—since the colonial era.

These are categorised into those that are non-for-profit and those purely for-profit.

This category of the non-for-profit private health facilities is comprised of facilities owned by religious institutions e.g mission hospitals, dispensaries and NGOs.

Mission hospitals have had quite an interesting long history as far as health care service delivery is concerned.

Purely for-profit health facilities in Tanzania started to flourish following establishment of the law that lifted the ban on private health service practices in the year 1991.

To-date, private health facilities have continued to offer services to a good number of Tanzanians.

Recent studies show that, about forty per cent of people are served by private health facility putting aside the fact that more than seventy per cent of health facilities are owned by the government.

With regards to quality of healthcare services, there have been divided views among different healthcare stakeholders on the quality of private health care service provision.

There are those who believe that private health facilities offer better and quality healthcare services compared to public health facilities and there are those who think the opposite is true.

However, studies too have not yet concluded which one is better but they go further, highlighting areas where both sectors have weaknesses and strengths.

The practices of these private health facilities are supposed to be regulated and monitored through government agencies.

There have been different associations dealing closely with private health practices and to mention some, there is Association of Private Health Facilities of Tanzania (APHTA) and the Christian Social Services Commission (CSSC).

In recent years, the government through the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Children and the Elderly, several times has shown interest in harmonising the treatment costs in both private and public hospitals.

The reason behind this development has been to try and bring about reliable and quality health services to Tanzanians.

With this view, there have been different reactions from among different stakeholders.

The question that accrues from here is: Is it fair for the government to set up price limits for medical treatment in private health facilities?

The first group says, it is absolutely right for the government to do so. These argue that, with all goodies private health facilities have shown, there are areas government need to intervene.

That, these private health facilities have been doing things randomly and most of the time unethical. Owners of these private facilities set high prices irrespective of the market forces.

Also it has been pointed out that, practices in private health facilities are for profit-motive and mostly lacking the sense of humanity.

This has paved the way to exploitation and unethical practices like drug overdoses and medical malpractices.

On the other hand, we have those who think that the government should not intervene in any means setting price limit for private health facilities because the prices are set by market forces.

They argue that the government’s involvement in setting price limits can be taken as a measure to kill the private health sector.

Private health facilities rely solely on cash collected from cost sharing for their sustainability as they receive little to no funds from the government.

This act per se may lead to collapse of this sector completely thus denying majority to access quality healthcare services offered by private health facilities.

In the sense of market forces, it can be depicted that owners of private health facilities regard public health facilities as the main competitor.

With this in mind, the government also ought to regard private facilities as their competitor and begin to focus in improving the quality of its facilities to match up rather than weakening them.

Weakening private health facilities brings no good to the government and the public at large.

In other way, this could discourage young medical entrepreneurs who have passion to create self-employment via private health service delivery.

The question is, can the effective public-private partnership (PPP) model solve this dilemma?

I don’t know. I only want to set this agenda.