Emergency rooms to be open to all

The government is planning to allow people to seek immediate and continued treatment from any medical facility in the event of an emergency, regardless of the health scheme they belong to.
The plan – which will likely add to the financial burden on the state – will take effect on April 1.
The government spends more than Bt420 billion a year on healthcare programmes. This amount is equivalent to 3.8 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
“If we don’t control the cost now, the government will very likely have to spend more than Bt700 billion a year on healthcare services by 2020,” Labour Ministry permanent secretary Dr Somkiat Chayasriwong said yesterday
Somkiat said Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra expressed concern about the growing medical costs during a meeting held to discuss ways of improving the country’s three main healthcare programmes – the social security scheme, the universal healthcare scheme and the Civil Servants Medical Benefits Scheme.
The three programmes cover all people across the country.
Under the proposed plan, in emergencies, patients would only need to produce their national identification cards to receive treatment, Public Health Minister Witthaya Buranasiri said.
“Patients can then receive treatment from either a state or private hospital,” he said.
Somkiat said the plan would put an end to the practice of medicalservice providers first asking patients which health programme they sought treatment under.
National Health Security Office (NHSO) secretarygeneral Dr Winai Sawasdivorn said the plan was created to provide services to patients in emergency cases.
“The plan is not about increasing benefits for the healthcare programmes’ members. These are benefits that were promised to them a long time ago. It’s just that in practice, the services are not very smooth and some patients have complained about being forced to pay medical bills first and wait for reimbursement later,” he said.
Winai said the Public Health Ministry would be negotiating with hospitals about the plan.
“It will work on reimbursement ceilings too,” he said.
An informed source said the ministry would have to define what constituted a medical emergency, provide details of each type of medical emergency, and the reimbursement rate for each.
Yingluck was expected to consider the planned reimbursement ceiling on March 13, the source added.
It said the ceiling for an appendicitis operation, for example, would likely be around Bt10,500, while that for heart surgery could be well above Bt100,000.
“Whether the plan will really be able to take effect on April 1 depends on the response from the private medical facilities. If they accept a rate based on the RW [relative weight], the plan should be able to go ahead as planned,” the source said.
Somkiat said that at yesterday’s meeting, authorities also planned to ensure all three healthcare programmes provide the same standard of treatment for chronic diseases.
“We will start with Aids and kidney diseases,” he said, adding that authorities hoped this plan would become a reality later this year.