Egypt's Medical Syndicate has pushed back against parliamentary calls to cap private clinic fees, declaring that citizens’ healthcare is the state’s responsibility, and not something to be regulated through price controls on doctors.
The dispute was ignited by MP Asem Abdel Aziz Morshed, who submitted a formal briefing request to the prime and health ministers after the government’s March 2026 fuel price hikes drove up the cost of private consultations. Morshed demanded to know “the regulatory mechanisms utilized to control medical service prices in the private sector” and asked whether there were “clear criteria linking actual operational costs to declared examination fees.”
While the syndicate’s official statement did not explicitly reference Morshed’s briefing request, it was issued directly against the backdrop of the controversy it sparked among physicians.
Before the official statement, the syndicate’s Assistant Secretary-General, Dr. Khaled Amin, published a Facebook post—which he later deleted—suggesting that private clinic examination fees should start at no less than 500 Egyptian pounds ($10) for specialists and 1,000 pounds ($20) for consultants, excluding ancillary medical services. Amin attributed the suggested pricing to skyrocketing operational and equipment costs, concluding: “For whoever cannot afford private clinics, government and university hospitals are available.”
Speaking to Al Manassa, Amin addressed his retracted social media remarks, stating that he deleted the post because it was “misinterpreted as though I am biased against patients, which is incorrect.”
“It was a call to comprehensively overhaul the health system so that reliance is not placed solely on private medical clinics, allowing patients to obtain better services under the care of the state,” Amin added.
Amin further emphasized that there is no constitutional or legal text that mandates price ceilings for the services provided. He noted that no country in the world regulates the value of health services delivered in private clinics, nor do they impose price controls on other liberal professions such as law or engineering.
In its formal statement, the Medical Syndicate countered the parliamentary push for price caps by highlighting the severe structural crisis facing Egypt’s medical professionals. The body argued that private clinic examination fees are inherently governed by multiple factors, including specialization, experience, and available clinical resources.
According to the syndicate, doctors turning to the private sector “does not reflect a luxury of choice as much as it reflects an urgent necessity imposed by current circumstances.” The body explained that doctors face severe livelihood and professional challenges due to dismal salaries within the government sector, noting that a large segment of young doctors earn close to the minimum wage, which does not align with their professional and humanitarian responsibilities.
Egypt continues to suffer from a severe shortage of physicians, driven by low state salaries and deteriorating public medical infrastructure. The number of doctors submitting resignations to the syndicate has surged sevenfold, from 1,044 resignations in 2016 to 7,000 in 2023.
The syndicate placed blame squarely on “health policies spanning more than 40 years” for converting “healthcare into a commodity subject only to the rules of supply and demand, representing a real challenge that threatens social justice and the human right to treatment.”
Consequently, the syndicate underscored the critical need to develop government hospitals, upgrade their efficiency, and improve the quality of their services so they can regain public trust and become a citizen’s primary choice for treatment, reiterating that the fact that vast numbers of citizens resort to the private sector “does not reflect a luxury.”
To resolve the systemic crisis, the syndicate asserted that its own indicative price guidelines merely aim to balance the rights of patients and healthcare providers “without infringing upon the independent nature of liberal professions.” Instead of price controls, the body urged authorities to accelerate the implementation of the Universal Health Insurance project, describing it as “one of the most critical and serious reform paths toward building a more equitable and efficient health system.”
The Medical Syndicate maintained that the full implementation and accelerated expansion of the Universal Health Insurance (UHI) system has become an urgent necessity to ensure all citizens receive genuine, dignified healthcare, particularly amid the massive and continuous rise in the cost of delivering medical services across both the public and private sectors.
The pilot phase of the UHI system originally launched in July 2019 in Port Said Governorate, with a legal framework slated to expand across the remaining governorates within a maximum period of 15 years.
The system is currently operational in six governorates: Port Said, Ismailiya, Suez, South Sinai, Luxor, and Aswan. It currently serves approximately 5.4 million beneficiaries, achieving an average registration rate of 83.6% of the target population in those active governorates.
On May 24, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly held a meeting to review legislative amendments to the Universal Health Insurance law, evaluating the expansion plan and the availability of funding to execute the system’s second phase.
