One of my uncles got paralyzed on his whole left side of body because of carelessness of govt hospital, lack of sanitation, corruption, and the general don't give a fuck attitude of the employees( if they cared to show up to work in the first place).
There is a running joke in India that "You can only go to a govt hospital" implication being that you'd not return alive.
I suspect this is another scheme concocted to gobble up public money via corruption. A gift that would keep giving for decades to come. For politicians to promise jobs in bureaucracy to their caste members.
Ofcourse, Nytimes piece mentions none of this in its effort to push "See even India has 'free' healthcare" ideology.
People who think Govt hospitals are not doing a bad job should at least visit a Govt hospital once. Govt. hospitals in india are pathetic. I have first hand experience with Government general hospital, Nellore.
I double-confirm this, but with the exception of charity and government hospitals. There are several such hospitals in every major metropolitan city in India. Of course, the 'nearest' hospital may not be one such. The private hospitals operate on pure capitalism and patients who cannot pay are always delayed and then later declared as brought dead on arrival (DOA).
This is perhaps the most dangerous fluff piece I have ever seen.
Most government hospitals in India reek of urine (people go on the walls), and have so poor hygiene standards that a slaughterhouse would be better. This "innovation" isn't something really ground changing people do this all the time around the world, but it doesn't happen in the US due to fear of lawsuits and other hassles.
I doubt that there is anything to teach to the US healthcare system. The truth is that almost all good medical professionals have answers and solutions to the problems that plague it, but the political climate doesn't allow it to happen. Those laws that straitjacket such cheap and sweet solutions while letting insurance companies get away with institutional murder.
On the other hand, in India such pieces create bursts of irrational pride and are oft quoted when people need a good cop out. According to most indians (citizens as well as politicians) silicon valley is powered by indianpride (tm), NASA runs on the backs of it's 60% indian workforce and so on. I truly wish that they would take a look around.
[edit: I am truly sorry if this sounds like an over-generalization. Beautiful examples of innovation exist in India as they do in every land on Earth, but the truth remains. Too many people live a life of suffering and die needlessly due to this system. India's HIV epidemic is comparable to that of Africa.
I exist in a place with excellent healthcare at an exceptionally cheap cost as compared to the US. Unfortunately the majority of people don't. There is a selection bias in operation over here. It is true that medical tourism is off the charts, but how many hospitals cater to them? What institutions do so? Also, there is almost no data available on the dearth of reliable doctors. This is a huge problem in rural areas where facilities exist only on paper.
I think that each one of us should experience the brutal poverty that most people face in this country before leaping on to such things. There are people working to change this. Let us respect them not write fluff pieces that encourage the divide between myth and reality.
I admit that I am not patriotic and I rebel against the concept of nations states, but those statistics are real live people and they matter. The only way to help them is to swallow the bitter pill and work on this.]
Many of my colleagues got sick in Hyderabad and from what I hear the hospitals directly sell drugs in black.
Three of them got admitted to yashodahospitals (https://www.yashodahospitals.com/) and all three of them had to pay 5x the price for Remdesivir. The worst part is this was sold to them by the hospital management.
Also, in India, when a doctor refers you to a diagnostic center for a lab test, the diagnostic center pays the doctor money in the form of a kickback.
It’s pathetic.
I live in the US and the healthcare situation is bad but not as bad as in India. You would never want to get sick in India and visit a hospital there.
Which is a bit odd, since outside a few elite private institutions, Indian hospitals are dire and the same media regularly carries horror stories of rooms full of corpses etc.
I wonder how does that even work? If someone drops in an injured person and leaves, will the hospital just let the injured person die on the floor? If bystanders doing nothing raises headlines in India, I'd imagine hospitals doing that would be an even bigger scandal.
In India you have these government run hospitals. Entry is essentially free and so is the emergency / opd treatment. For procedures they charge peanuts compared to private sector. The only thing, there is a waiting list and hygeine is not always a priority.
There is an AIIMS hospital in Delhi and I had the misfortune of taking a relative there for treating surgical infection. It was brutal. We got in line around 9 am. Had to put the patient on a gurney and wait. Around 3 pm slowly our place reached to the inside emergency ward. Around 7 pm we finally were attended by an intern. Took 6 pricks to insert a catather then a senior resident was called in to help. Around an hour later the medication started to do some work. Around 10 pm more medication was administered. We ended up asking the doctor to let us go because it was 12 am and we needed to consume some food, pee.
Never again. This was around 5 years ago and I hope things have improved for the sake of patients.
I suspect the issue is less of a general attitude and more of a combo of poor resources and poverty. Tons of hospitals in India are spanking clean - though these are often the private ones.
Why are you blaming Aadhar instead of hospital. What kind of hospital turncoat aways critical patients. Btw the hospital in my area were not accepting card payments before demonization. They wanted only cash.
As an Indian living in India, I've heard some of these stories:
a. They are asked to get admitted "for observation because they are at high risk". If they ask to leave, the doctors ask them to sign a very scary sounding wavier disclaiming the hospital of responsibility for their death.
b. There apparently this one lab that will return a positive covid test if the docs ask them to and they get a cut of what the patient pays.
It needs to be said that I don't know if any of these are true.
> private hospitals often forward patients they are unable to handle (e.g. complicated births) to public hospitals, who are more skilled and experienced.
In India, this happens simply because private hospitals don't want mortalities on their hands. Complicated cases often mean higher chances of things going wrong. Best let the public hospitals handle it.
This happens quite frequently because hospitals tend to fear repercussions.
First, they fear the overzealous police who might ask for bribes because they admitted an accident victim.
Second, they fear mob violence. If even a small thing goes wrong people tend to go on a rampage - breaking stuff and harassing people.
Third, lack of awareness and general apathy of law. Most cases in India tend to run for years altogether. So, while there is a legal framework for such cases many hospitals are not aware of it or they just want to avoid making court trips for years.
> in the aftermath of austerity and with not enough staff to go round
Pay more, get more nurses.
Or you can trade-off nurses for less-good health care.
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Just to show an "existence proof" of an alternate universe, there are two totally free hospitals in India. They have no billing desk because they do not bill.
So how is it funded?
The people who work there and who support them financially believe that they are literally working for God. It is as if a Christian was volunteering to work at hospitals established by Jesus.
> The Sri Sathya Sai Institutes of Higher Medical Sciences also popularly known as Super Specialty Hospitals are tertiary health care hospitals established by Sri Sathya Sai Baba to provide patient care facilities to all irrespective of caste, class, creed, gender, religion or nationality totally free of charge.
Conditions of Public hospitals hugely depends on the state. States like Kerala has good public hospitals while other states have very pathetic health system.
Huh. 8 or 9 years ago I visited somebody in a hospital in rural India (maybe 100km from Hubli), and this was definitely not the case. A man was being ejected (after intake!) from the hospital with acute appendicitis because he and his family was unable to pay. There were probably 3 nurses in the hospital and 40 patients over several floors. The degraded ductwork and disgusting window mount aircon looked like legionnaires disease would kill anybody who could afford to stay.
Has a lot changed in the last decade? Is the “good” healthcare just in wealthier areas? Was this just an extreme outlier?
There is a running joke in India that "You can only go to a govt hospital" implication being that you'd not return alive.
I suspect this is another scheme concocted to gobble up public money via corruption. A gift that would keep giving for decades to come. For politicians to promise jobs in bureaucracy to their caste members.
Ofcourse, Nytimes piece mentions none of this in its effort to push "See even India has 'free' healthcare" ideology.
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