Fair price, full responsibility

The Ministry of Health's decision to approve a 4% increase in medical service prices at specialized hospitals is a step in the roadmap to "accurately and fully" calculate healthcare costs. This is not simply an economic calculation, but a crucial lever to re-establish the quality of medical examination and treatment with the overarching goal: adjusted hospital fees, correspondingly improved service quality, and patients being the primary beneficiaries.

Báo Sài Gòn Giải phóng•29/06/2026

In reality, behind a medical examination, a surgery, or a hospital bed lies an entire management system: electricity, water, maintenance, repair of equipment, operation of information technology systems, asset management, patient safety, infection control, medical waste disposal, and many other indirect costs…

If these costs are not properly accounted for, hospitals will struggle to find the resources to upgrade quality. Old equipment will be slow to be replaced, dilapidated infrastructure will be difficult to renovate, new technologies will be slow to be implemented, and the lives of healthcare workers will be difficult to improve. Ultimately, patients will be the ones who suffer. However, adjusting healthcare service prices is only meaningful when it creates a real change in the quality of medical care.

This is a crucial point for the policy to gain social consensus. Patients can empathize with the difficulties faced by hospitals, and they understand that a hospital that wants to be cleaner, more modern, less overcrowded, and have better doctors needs resources. However, patients cannot accept a situation where prices increase without a corresponding improvement in quality.

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Therefore, along with implementing the new prices, hospitals need to publicly disclose their plans for using the increased revenue. These resources must be transformed into concrete improvements: shortening waiting times for examinations; reducing administrative procedures; expanding online appointment registration; linking laboratory and diagnostic imaging results; upgrading waiting areas, wards, and restrooms; improving meals, hospital security, and patient guidance.

In particular, service attitude must be considered part of healthcare quality. Hospitals are not just places for treating illnesses with medicine and technology, but also places where patients need to be reassured, listened to, explained things to, and treated with respect. Adjusting healthcare service prices is a necessary step in this process. But this process cannot stop at just the price list.

More importantly, a new standard must be established in public hospital governance: proper collection and expenditure, transparency, and patient satisfaction as the benchmark. Properness and completeness not only refer to the full cost of direct expenses, labor costs, or administrative costs. It also encompasses the full responsibility for service delivery, the full accountability, and the full commitment to improving quality.

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