Medical costs rising 4x faster than your salary and 40 crore Indians have no insurance, who can afford to get sick?

Medical inflation in India is running at 14 percent annually. Your salary? Probably growing at 3 to 4 percent if you are lucky. That means healthcare costs are rising 4 times faster than your income. Let me put that in perspective. If a hospital stay costs Rs 50,000 today, in 5 years at 14 percent inflation it will cost nearly Rs 96,000. But your salary in 5 years at 4 percent growth will only go from Rs 50,000 to Rs 60,000. So the hospital stay that took 1 month of your salary will take nearly 2 months of your salary in 5 years. And we are not even talking about major surgeries or long treatments. Those can cost lakhs. An NSSO survey found that 46 percent of rural and 32 percent of urban households have some form of insurance. But here is the catch. Most of these policies cover so little that one major illness still wipes out everything. The coverage limits are a joke. A Rs 5 lakh policy sounds good until you realize that ICU stays can cost Rs 50,000 per day. Your Rs 5 lakh coverage lasts 10 days in the ICU. After that, you are on your own. And then there are the 40 crore Indians who have no real insurance at all. They are caught in the middle. Too rich for PMJAY which covers BPL families. Too poor for private insurance that costs Rs 15,000 to 50,000 per year. What are they supposed to do? Just not get sick? Private hospitals charge 7 to 8 times more than govt hospitals for the same treatment. Same medicine, same procedure, same doctor qualification. The only difference is the building looks nicer and the AC works. Is that worth 8 times the cost? The govt keeps announcing new schemes and policies but the ground reality has not changed. Govt hospitals are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. You wait 4 hours to see a doctor for 4 minutes. The equipment is old or broken. The wards are dirty. So people are forced to go to private hospitals where they get charged Rs 50,000 for what should cost Rs 10,000. And the govt does nothing to regulate private hospital pricing. Hospitals can charge whatever they want. There is no price cap. No transparency. You get a bill with 50 line items and you cannot understand any of them. They charge you for gloves, for syringes, for the room, for the bed, for the fan, for the light. It is itemized extortion. Medical loans are now a thing. People are taking loans to pay for treatment. Loans. To not die. In a country that claims to be the fastest growing economy in the world, people are going bankrupt because they got sick. The WHO says 63 million Indians are pushed into poverty every year due to healthcare costs. 63 million. That is more than the population of many countries. Every single year. Has good healthcare become a luxury only for the rich?