NASHIK: The Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) has served show cause notices to nine private hospitals for overcharging Covid patients during the second wave of the pandemic.
NMC had inspected over 1,500 bills of Covid patients from these nine hospitals and had found inflated bills, amounting to Rs 4.5 lakh, were issued to about 50 patients. The civic body has given an ultimatum of seven days to return the excess bill amount to the patients concerned.
B G Sonkamble, the chief auditor of NMC, said they had collected over 1,500 bills of Covid patients from these nine hospitals, but we have found an excess amount charged from 50 patients.
“We have served show-cause notices to these nine private Covid hospitals in the city,” said Sonkamble.
NMC started a pre-audit of Covid patients’ bills in August last year. Since then, NMC appointed auditors have saved excess bills of Rs 5.84 crore of around 24,200 patients undergoing treatment in private hospitals.
Pre-auditing of bills were made mandatory for private hospitals through the auditors before handing it over to the patients at the time of discharge.
So far, the auditors have inspected around 57,000 bills and have found overcharging in over 24,200 bills.
Since January, NMC auditors have saved excess bills of around Rs 2.18 crore.
During the first phase of Covid, there were only 75 private Covid hospitals in the city and NMC had deployed auditors at all private Covid hospitals.
The number of private Covid hospitals had increased to over 150 during the second wave. Hence, deploying auditors in the private hospitals was delayed.
