About two hundred youths armed with rods and sticks came rioting to a nursing home not fifty metres from where I stay last evening. A thirty-three year old with some kind of heartache (or was it heartburn?) was admitted there yesterday. The seniormost doctor in charge administered what became a fatal injection. The young man died. His neighbourhood friends were angry and it took police to fight them back, but only after the zone began to resemble any riot-torn locality although on a smaller scale.
Nothing is new in the story, only a few names and locations. Mob fury erupts from time to time, property is laid to waste, nothing really changes except some damage, and a few lives sometimes. We live in a country with few records of doctors facing charges of negligence. There are jokes about doctors becoming true doctors after killing a few. Yet this is the country which has "exported" countless doctors abroad. Once upon a time, Calcutta was at the forefront of medical research. But that's once upon a time. With politicisation of education, nothing has been spared. Not even the medical profession.
Healthcare, some may argue has improved with proliferation of countless nursing homes and clinics and technology. However it has actually become a profession in which to remain ethical and true to the Hippocratic oath is often impossible. That does not mean we do not have any good doctors or nurses. The question is more often about the quality of healthcare that is available. It is not always an economic issue.
We had a neighbour who had multiple kidney failure. With dialysis, and sometimes with successful transplants, patients with malfunctioning kidneys get a fresh lease of life. She was in her fifties and her case was complicated with high blood sugar. She was admitted for dialysis. In a day or two they operated on her heart in spite of her blood sugar. She died. All her medical insurance went into it. May be we do not know enough about medical science to comment on what happened. But I have heard a patient with blood sugar should not be operated on in the first place without getting the sugar levels in check. Secondly, there was no history of such a heart condition. Makes one one wonder what really happened.
There are cases that the private clinics charge as much as possible for any patient. Even the ones who are dead. There have been cases that medicine and clinic costs have been extracted for a dead patient, some even left on ventilators for over five days. At the time of grief, most people pay up, or if they have insurance, the clinics very efficiently use up the entire amount or more while the near ones are rarely in any condition to protest. Sometimes they do, like yesterday evening, with results which only inconvenience other people. That is a risk the businessmen behind healthcare are willing to take anyway: they probably are covered against acts of god and mortals in any case.
Government hospitals are notorious. It is depressing to even go into one. The sickly smell of medicine and disinfectants hang heavy on the masses of lesser privileged who go there. The staff can be downright rude or even threatening. Supplies, even essential life-savers are hard to come by. Animals and pests do rounds of the ward as do touts and other such people who make a living out of the establishment. There are horror stories of new borns eaten to death by ants, rats and other pests while left unattended.
Air conditioned private establishments are spic and span. They are looking for your insurance plan. They will take you in even for indigestion if you have the money or a good insurance plan. And some even try to kill you or extend your stay as long as possible so your plan is made use of fully. It's good to know people on the inside, you might just get out alive, or at least, with less damage to your health and less burden on your personal finances.
A friend's father, a geologist who worked for the central government is seriously ill and needs a major heart surgery. The thousand dollars needed for it should be paid by the government from a scheme which covers all employees and pensioners of the government. However, since he was admitted to a private centre which of course is reputedly the best place in the city, they needed to approach the government agency in charge of disbursement. The bureaucrats with their checks and balances emphasised the need to regulate private clinics, and while the patient was ailing, declared "Procedure cannot be changed". The outcome: the "panel" did not approve of the surgery, so they would not pay. That is what most people after a life time of hard work for the country can expect to get back. No doubt the governmental agency has an expert panel of doctors from the best institutions of the country as advisers. No doubt that they also have those bureaucrats in their ranks who have perfected the techniques of creating a Kafkaesque hell on earth.
Healthcare indeed, I call it hellcare.
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