Medical bills, travel costs add to healthcare burden in Telangana

NSO data highlights the financial burden of healthcare in Telangana, where average hospitalisation costs Rs 52,743. Medical travel adds another expense, with Indian households spending an average Rs 32,167 per health-related overnight trip, excluding treatment costs themselves.

Hyderabad: For ordinary families in Hyderabad and districts, falling sick has increasingly become a double whammy of sorts. Recent data emerging from National Statistics Office (NSO) 80th Round survey reveals that patients, especially from middle-income families, are increasingly finding themselves trapped in a squeeze, caught between the burden of expensive medical bills on one side and heavy price they pay for travel, lodging and other incidental logistics just to access specialised care.

While major urban centers like Hyderabad continue to serve as premier healthcare destinations, the journey to access these facilities extracts a heavy toll on rural households. Similarly, when patients from Hyderabad are forced to travel to specialised out-of-state facilities like NIMHANS in Bengaluru or a cancer facility in Mumbai for advanced treatments, they end up facing the same financial toll.

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Based on the NSO’s comprehensive data on household social consumption and health, released a few months ago, the immediate financial blow for families is from inflated hospital bills. The average medical expenditure per hospitalisation case (excluding childbirth) across public and private facilities combined in Telangana stands at a steep Rs 52,743.

The average of Rs 52,743 mostly consists of out-of-pocket spending on diagnostics, specialised drugs, and private sector dependence. For daily-wage earners, tenant farmers, and low-income households in districts like Adilabad, Khammam, Mahabubnagar, and Nalgonda, a single round of inpatient care often wipes out months of savings or forces families to take ‘hand loans’ and fall into a financial mess.

In addition to the medical expenses, latest data from the NSO’s Domestic Tourism Expenditure Survey, released a few days ago, reveals that medical travel is the costliest category of domestic overnight travel in India, averaging Rs 32,167 per trip overall, with rural households spending an average of Rs 29,454 per trip.

In Telangana, since secondary, tertiary and quaternary care is centralised in Hyderabad, patients and their families from remote rural pockets frequently undertake overnight medical trips.

The NSO data shows that rural households in Telangana and other parts of the country travel more (49 per 100 households) compared to urban areas (22 per 100 households), which means they have to incur expenditure in the form of private transport or multiple bus fares, renting makeshift rooms, or sleeping in hospital corridors or outside in Hyderabad, and arranging meals for attendants over extended periods.

Hospitalisation cost

Medical travel is the costliest category of domestic overnight travel in India

On average, families spend Rs 32,167 overall per trip

Rural households spend Rs 29,454 and urban households spend Rs 41,649.

Health and medical trips account for 29.6 per cent of all overnight trips completed in a year

Average medical expenditure per hospitalisation (excluding childbirth) in public and private facilities combined in Telangana stands at a steep Rs 52,743

Rural households in Telangana travel more frequently than urban ones

They undertake 49 overnight medical trips per 100 tourist households to reach city-based facilities