Last week, the verdict from Supreme Court has forced the private laboratories to offer free Covid-19 testing to everyone, but now the apex Court has revised its verdict on Monday.
Supreme Court Revised Its Order On Private Covid-19 Tests
The two-judge bench which includes justices Ashok Bhushan and S Ravindra Bhat has ordered that only people who might not afford Rs 4,500 for the test should only be tested free by private laboratories.
In the first example, the court said people who are eligible under the Ayushman Bharat scheme wouldn’t have to pay for it. The judges on the other hand have also asked the Centre for notifying other categories of economically weaker sectors in the nation who may possibly be tested without a charge.
The court stated, “The government…. may consider as to whether any other categories of weaker sections of the society e.g. workers belonging to low income groups in the informal sectors, beneficiaries of Direct Benefit Transfer, etc, apart from those covered under tAyushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Aroogya Yojana are also eligible for the benefit of free testing and issue appropriate guidelines in the above regard also within a period of one week,”
In whichever cases, the private labs might not have to bear the financial load of the free testing. It permitted the government to come out with detailed guidelines in order to compensate the expenditure that has been sustained by the private labs on free tests.
Later on 8th April 2020, the judges had also ordered free tests on a petition that has been filed by a lawyer Shashank Deo Sudhi, who had emphasized that people were forced to turn to private labs since government hospitals were packed to capacity.
After that, the judges had agreed with this argument as well as delivered its final decision.
The two-judge bench, on the other hand, decided to hear the case after a Delhi-based doctor has claimed that the burden would discourage private labs as well as reduce the capacity to conduct tests in the country.
He said, “Even the present capacity of the labs, both government and private, appears to be woefully insufficient to obtain accurate data and control the pandemic”,
The Centre’s Indian Council of Medical Research, which had earlier appealed to laboratories for testing people without a charge, had also asked the Supreme Court to revise its order.
