Health for all: Reclaiming the soul of Indian healthcare

India’s medical institutions, once revered as sanctuaries of healing, are today rapidly degenerating into centres of unchecked commercial exploitation. What was meant to serve humanity has, in many cases, become a profit-driven enterprise, indifferent to human suffering.

The Hippocratic Oath, solemnly taken by every doctor, clearly states: “I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never to injure or wrong them.” Yet, in today’s healthcare ecosystem, this sacred pledge is being brazenly violated. Healing has been replaced by billing, and compassion by calculation. Medical colleges and hospitals increasingly function like corporate entities, where patients are viewed not as human beings in distress but as revenue-generating units. Unnecessary diagnostic tests, inflated bills, denial of ethical care, and coercive treatment practices have become disturbingly common.

Even more alarming is the unholy nexus between hospitals and insurance companies, which often results in inflated claims, denial of genuine treatments, and the ruthless exploitation of helpless patients. The poor and middle class suffer the most, stripped of dignity at their most vulnerable moments. Equally dangerous is the widespread circulation of spurious, substandard, and unnecessary medicines, prescribed not for healing but for profit. This amounts to nothing less than a silent public health crime. Regulatory bodies such as the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals (NABH), the National Medical Commission, and State Medical Councils appear to have reduced themselves to mere licensing authorities, frequently turning a blind eye to grave ethical violations. Accreditation has become more procedural than principled, more bureaucratic than moral. It is deeply troubling that the Government of India, along with institutions such as the NABH, Central Consumer Protection Department (CCPD), Indian Medical Council, and the Indian Medical Association, has failed to exercise effective moral and regulatory authority.

Instead of protecting patients, the system often shields powerful medical lobbies. Institutions such as the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), State Human Rights Commissions (SHRCs), and allied bodies have, in many cases, failed to act decisively. Their silence in the face of blatant injustice amounts to institutional abdication.

The State cannot remain a mute spectator while citizens are reduced to victims within systems meant to protect them. Healthcare is not a commodity; it is a moral obligation and a constitutional responsibility. India urgently needs stringent laws, uncompromising enforcement, and exemplary punishment for those who betray medical ethics. The nation must reclaim the soul of its healthcare system. The time has come to bridge the widening chasm between corporate interests and clinical care. This demands a fundamental shift in how healthcare is governed, centred on three imperatives: legislative accountability, transparent supervision, and decisive state action. Legislative accountability requires the enactment of a national framework that holds hospitals legally and criminally liable for predatory billing and medically unjustified procedures.

Transparent supervision must transform regulatory bodies from passive licensing offices into active guardians of ethics, while incorporating independent civil society oversight to curb the influence of medical lobbies. Decisive state action presupposes that the State can no longer remain a mute spectator to the unholy practices prevailing in the healthcare sector. We must dismantle systems that prioritise ledger entries over human lives. India must urgently reclaim the soul of its healthcare system by restoring human dignity to the centre of medical practice. The nation expects—and deserves—nothing less.

Professor Richard Hay is a former Member of Parliament; views are personal