Home ›› 26 Dec 2022 ›› Editorial
The government is reportedly increasing the budget allocation for the health sector but it is yet to offer the facilities to all its citizens let alone free-of-cost treatment. A large number of poor people living in remote parts of the country can’t even imagine treatments of complicated diseases at grassroots levels. Serious patients very often have to travel to the capital city for treatments. Some of them even die on the way to hospitals much to the frustration of their near and dear ones.
Under such circumstances when the country mostly needs to prepare itself for more public hospitals, private hospitals are mushrooming taking the treatment cost beyond the capacity of common people. Not that, public hospitals are not providing treatment to people. They are doing so to their utmost capacity but it is not sufficient for this huge population.
Firstly, the number of public hospitals is much less than the population demands, secondly, the treatment facilities they offer are not adequate and thirdly whatever facilities they offer are not enough to provide treatment to all. As a result, in many cases people have to return from the doors of hospitals unattended and die premature deaths.
Given a third world country, many foreign countries and development organizations like World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Global Fund, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) come to Bangladesh’s help every year by providing medical equipment and medicines as gift or aid for the improvement of the health sector.
These equipment and medicines are given to public hospitals for the treatment of poor and downtrodden people of the country. But it is disheartening to hear that we even can’t receive them due to VAT complication. Portable X-ray machines, monitors to check up the health condition of patients, Computerized tomography (CT) scanners, electrocardiography or ECG machines, blood gas analyzers, oxygen generators, ambulance and mobile clinics, about six lakh pesticide-added mosquito nets for malaria prevention, 2, 54, 99, 200 syringes for Covid-19 inoculation, 2.55 lakh pieces of safety boxes, 2, 00, 04,000 mebendazole tablets are lying uncared for at the Chittagong Port and the Hazrat Shahjalal Internation Airport for months.
A report in this regard was published in The Business Post on 25 December 2022. The report said the delivery was supposed to be received by the Central Medicine Service Department (CMSD). But its officials told the newspaper that the organization had run out of money and this was the reason they couldn’t receive the delivery of the medical equipment and drugs sent from abroad.
To release the medical equipment from the airport without any VAT requires the permission of the Minister of State for Shipping because the regulation of the National Board of Revenue (NBR) has made it mandatory for the release of all goods including gift and donations. We don’t know why this has been taking a long time even after Japanese Ambassador to Bangladesh wrote a letter to the Health Ministry in this regard back in July.
When the TBP asked Health Ministry Additional Secretary Nilufar Naznin about the issue she said: “It is a gradual process. The NBR and the Chittagong Port Authority are looking into the matter. We are trying our best to resolve the matter.”
Such dilly-dallying in releasing medical equipment that come to our country as a kind of blessing for the poor segment of people will not only deprive them of their medical treatment it will also discourage those who send them every year to our country to help improve the health sector. Again because of long delay in releasing the medical equipment and drugs they are getting expired.
We are drawing the attention of the Health Ministry and the department concerned to get those equipment and drugs released without VAT as they will save lives of hundreds of people, if not millions.
