People sleeping in the corridor of a hospital.How much will a heart surgery cost? Is there any freebie with it? Soon, people will go to our hospitals and ask these questions because there is no specific rate for treatment. Rates of treatment vary from time to time, like in the stock market. If a new hospital comes up, the rates at the nearby hospital will go down.
Huge hoardings on the sides of roads have astounded me. Some even proclaim “get a heart attack and come to us in peace”.
When a hospital advertises that “there is no greater misfortune than not having children, and we will solve it”, it does not see the pain of thousands with no children.
The truth is that many hospitals fail to see the pain of the poor.
The time has come for hospitals to show more kindness. If a situation arises in which a family gets wrecked if any member of it falls sick, many patients in future will prefer to die instead of getting treated.
It is true that the cost of running a hospital has gone up. But every hospital must have some facility for the poor. I remember lying with rows of patients on the veranda of a government hospital in Chennai forty years ago after contracting small pox.
For days, I was there like a destitute on the veranda of a shop. The love showered by doctors and nurses then still remains in my mind like a medicine that has not lost its potency.
The government should decide the maximum amount that can be charged for a treatment. Government doctors say a heart can be transplanted for only Rs 2 lakh. Up to Rs 40 lakh has to be paid in a private hospital for the same treatment. What does it mean?
The situation that government hospital is for the poor and private hospital is for the rich should change. Law mandates that if the member of a village panchayat or an MLA quits, a new person must be elected in six months. But the government can keep a doctor’s chair vacant in a taluk hospital forever. Isn’t the appointment of a doctor more urgent than electing an MLA?
When there are no doctors, it is the poorest among the poor who do not get treatment. The main reason for the poor treatment of patients at government hospitals is that they do not have adequate staff.
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