A study conducted across six states of Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Assam, Jharkhand, and Bihar (surveying the cost of treatment among 2,723 households in 140 villages), by non-governmental organisation Prayas has found that the cost of health care has gone up by 22 times in rural areas over the last seven years. To understand this better, if we assume that a family in some Uttarakhand village used to spend Rs 100 annually in health care in 2004, it is now, in 2011, spending Rs 2200.

This is the average increase in the cost of treatment at both private and public hospitals.
The study which aimed at finding how much of the cost of treatment is given by the patient himself/herself, after giving due considerations to factors such as inflation, privatisation, and even the failure of social schemes, found the whopping hike in the cost of treatment during the study period.

The cost of healthcare in the urban areas increased somewhere around 40 times as urban people are opting for private healthcare more than the Government healthcare.

The study took both hospitalised and non-hospitalised treatment into account, including the cost of diagnostics, hospitalisation, and medicines.
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