Bust the cartel controlling ambulance service with high cost for patients

Whoever hired an ambulance to carry a patient to or from a hospital, be that in the capital or outside the capital in districts, they know that they could not do it without paying almost double of what could be its reasonable price. When you are with a patient who needs to be urgently transferred for treatment, that is you are in an emergency, the ambulance driver or owner exactly exploits this helplessness.
You are forced to pay what they demand. The syndicate or cartel of ambulance owners are so active in every public hospital that it does not let any ambulance from other districts take patients away and, with the excuse that the ambulance will have to make the return trip empty, the driver of an ambulance charges double the actual fare. For a long time this practice has been going on, but during the current high inflation people are suffering more than ever before.
According to a report in a national daily yesterday if an ambulance from outside the district carries a patient out of a hospital, the syndicate keeps half the fare. This is how a patient who is already hit by medical expenses has to count even more money. The patients have become rather helpless in the hands of this syndicate which has monopolised the ambulance service in absence of an active government control.
It is not that the government has not encouraged people to buy an ambulance and serve patients. It did. On humanitarian grounds, the government has cut the import duty on ambulances. It has fixed the import duty for the run-off-the-mill ambulances about 31 per cent when the buyer of the same vehicle in the microbus configuration this duty is about 90 per cent. Despite that, people have to pay exorbitantly for ambulance service.
Reportedly, members of two ambulance owners’ associations — Bangladesh Ambulance Owners’ Welfare Association and Dhaka Metropolitan Ambulance Owners’ Cooperative Association — form a syndicate in every public hospital. These two associations have taken all ambulances across the country under their control. The Health Ministry as well as law enforcing agencies must relieve the patients from the illegal operation of the syndicate. They must ensure that patients do not pay more than what they should do.