Manali Shah (name changed on request), a 33-year-old software engineer working in the private  sector, lost her savings of eight years in a day when her father, 65, underwent a liver transplant in a private hospital. “Not only did my savings go, I also had to borrow money from the family to foot the bill. The procedure and hospitalisation cost almost Rs 30 lakh, and we have to continue spending Rs 10,000 each month for medicines, follow-up consultations and diagnostics,” she says

Each round of chemotherapy and radiation costs her almost Rs 1 lakh, but she didn’t consider AIIMS because the radiotherapy machine there is booked for the next seven months. [The cost of one round of chemotherapy in AIIMS was just Rs 750/- at that time, hence the overbooking]. From a report in Hindustan Times, 20 October 2013

Doctor, heal thyself, was my initial reaction when I read the front page report in The Hindu that ‘Docs’ were opposing ‘negative’ portrayal by NCERT. The objection raised by them is that the class VII textbook, Social and Political Life II, contained “objectionable description ” of the medical profession. Or so you believe till you realize, by the time you are into the third paragraph of the report, that the issue is not at all about the negative portrayal of the medical profession as such but of its elite practitioners who are making a killing in elite private medical institutions and hospitals at the expense of the ordinary people.

So it is not doctors in general – those who work in trying conditions in government hospitals – who are raising the objection but the Indian Medical Association that professes to be “the only representative, national voluntary organisation of Doctors of Modern Scientific System of Medicine, which looks after the interest of doctors as well as the well being of the community at large”.  The IMA says the news report, has written to the President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi “demanding immediate remedial action”. Continue reading IMA’s Promotion of Healthcare Privatization Through Insidious Attack on NCERT Textbook →