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Covid-19: After Supreme Court orders free tests, labs urge govt to reimburse costs
Coronavirus in India: While the labs said they would obey the order, some firms were considering a legal challenge saying it would be difficult for the laboratories to continue testing for free.
Private laboratories on Thursday urged the government to intervene after the Supreme Court asked all Covid-19 tests to be free of charge, even as experts said the judgment could impact the effective expansion of testing, which is key to the containment of the infection.
While the labs said they would obey the order, some firms were considering a legal challenge saying it would be difficult for the laboratories to continue testing for free.
Experts said the order, while aimed at making testing easily available, may force many private firms to scale down operations at a time when the infection has reached almost every state and intensive testing is urgently required.
“Humanitarian in intent but impractical to implement - I fear testing will plummet,” said Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar Shaw on Twitter. “A judgment that will severely affect testing. Private labs simply cannot be expected to run their businesses on credit,” she added.
Responding to a public interest litigation, the top court on Wednesday made Covid-19 tests in government and private laboratories free, and asked the government to pass the necessary orders to make this possible. The tests are already free in the 139 authorised government laboratories. Private laboratories used to charge Rs 4,500 previously.
“We may not file a petition in the Supreme Court yet, as we have been talking to the government, and it seems inclined towards working out a solution to help us. However, until that happens we will be offering the test for free,” said Dr Arvind Lal, chairman and managing director, Dr Lal PathLabs, one of the 67 private sector players permitted to test by the government.
Some experts -- such as Girdhar Gyani, director general of the Association of Healthcare Providers -- said the government could reimburse the cost of testing to private labs. During the hearing on Wednesday, the court had also asked the government to reimburse laboratories but didn’t pass an order to this effect.
“There is a lot of confusion at the moment whether to charge or not; until the confusion clears out, I have given standing instructions to my staff not to charge anyone for Covid-19 testing,” said Navin Dang, founder of Dr Dangs Lab.
Corporate hospitals also decided to conduct the tests for free, but indicated that they were speaking with the government “Since we have not heard anything from the government yet, we are not charging anything for Covid-19 testing,” said a spokesperson for Apollo hospital. A spokesperson for the Max Hospital said, “Based on the latest order of the SC, Max Healthcare has stopped charging for the Covid test. We are awaiting further directive from the government.”
But many private labs said they would find it tough to sustain testing at a time when India needed to dramatically scale up testing.
“We need test more, much more, as what we are doing right now is nowhere close to what we should be doing. We would need at least one lakh tests in a day. The next 10 days window is critical, so the government will have to think of a way such as creating a corpus or subsiding testing so that it’s feasible for private players to do the tests. For small standalone labs it will be nearly impossible to sustain free testing,” said Sanjeev Bagai, chairman and managing director, Nephron Clinic.
Indian Council of Medical Research director general Balram Bhargava did not respond to calls and text messages despite repeated attempts.
