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He called it “misery tax” on Budget Day last week. Now Dr Devi Prasad Shetty wants us to take up the cudgels against it and tell the Government to have a heart and roll it back.
The new service tax proposed in Budget 2011-12 is feared to touch services at almost all private hospitals.
The public relations office at Narayana Hrudayalaya, Dr Shetty's heart-to-joints enterprise, has in the last 24 hours sent out thousands of e-mails to fellow doctors, patients, friends exhorting them to go to Raj Bhavan on March 12 and petition the Governor to get the tax dropped.
‘Dear Aam Aadmi,' the letter signed by Dr Shetty and put on NH Web site goes on, ‘Let us choose the 12th of March as Misery Day.'
He explains that the five per cent service tax on hospitals with air-conditioning and at least 25 beds and more ‘means that if you undergo any heart operation and spend Rs 1 lakh on (it), you must pay Rs 5,000 more to the Government as service tax. If you have to undergo a major (cancer) surgery, followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy, be prepared to shell out an extra Rs 20,000 as service tax.'
A preventive check against heart attack or cancer would get Rs 500 costlier. Poor villagers who pay Rs 5-10 a month for micro-health insurance must pay 10 per cent service tax. “Service tax on health insurance will only make it unaffordable .'
Dr Shetty explains its impact: “This is a ‘misery tax' as the Government wants to make money out of your misery. No surgerycan be performed without an air-conditioned operation theatre. Legally, a blood bank cannot get licence without air-conditioning. CT, MRI and catheterisation labs do not function without air-conditioning. Hospitals cannot function without air-conditioning.”
80 per cent of people do not insure and pay their medical costs out of pocket. Many die without getting advanced care as it is costly. A Government that spends less than 1 per cent of the GDP on healthcare does not have the moral right to tax healthcare, he argues.
Already, healthcare is heavily taxed. Hospitals pay central sales tax, custom duty, luxury tax, entry tax, VAT, excise duty, besides electricity bills at highest tariff levels. “How can the hospitals provide affordable healthcare?
"“We only want the right policy to make healthcare affordable,” Dr Shetty says. The British taxed salt and our Government taxes our miseries."
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