In a shocking incident in Mumbai, a baby was sold by the doctors of a hospital because the parents could not clear their dues. Neha Gaokar, the mother of the newly born was virtually held prisoner at the hospital. She did not even know that her baby had been sold. She had just signed on some papers, according to Pandarinath Mandre the police inspector looking after this case. Steven Mascarenhas, the man who bought the child claims, he was unaware of the illegal deal. Neha was finally rescued by social workers and the baby is with the mother. The hospital doctors Harivardhan Bhansali and his son Ankur are now in custody as the police investigate a wider child trafficking racket. The incident is shocking, deplorable and condemnable. Selling a child is beyond imagination. This is certainly not the way to settle accounts and is insane and inhuman.
And it is all well to judge and condemn, but there are wider issues here. Private hospitals and nursing homes exist because the promoters and owners want to make money, if they didn’t these institutes would be charitable. Doctors have families and have to feed them and provide them all the facilities that an engineer, manager or any other person would like to. Most private hospitals at least that I know of in Delhi, take some amount of advance before admitting the patient. In this particular case when the woman was in labour if the doctor had denied admission because the woman could not afford the cost was also not a very humane thing to do. The doctor can admit a patient or two on compassionate grounds but managing a hospital is not inexpensive. The infrastructure, employees and govt taxes, all have to be paid. How long can he survive? What is he supposed to do?
Medical emergencies force you to take decisions on compassionate grounds. A friend of mine sanctioned a loan of a few lakhs to his accountant because his wife needed urgent surgery. The accountant’s wife recuperated and a part of his salary was deducted from his salary every month to repay the loan. Soon after this, the accountant resigned and blamed my friend for the loss of a perfectly good job. My friend was startled, but the accountant explained that if he hadn’t sanctioned the loan, the accountant would have been forced to resort to treatment for his wife in a government hospital. He couldn’t afford to live on a deducted salary and therefore had to leave the job. This is a true story but an eye opener. I can’t figure out the moral of the story.
from Vishesh :)
from Reema :)
24 Comments
January 3, 2009 at 5:13 pm
@ prerna : Well I saw this news last evening and it was all so cliche and predictable. A greedy doctor, a desperate and a poor woman. However herein comes a question in my mind. Why is there no national medical insurance in India. All of us pay taxes right? If not indirect than direct taxes. How much money would it take to cover people? It can be done according to income? Students can be covered free? Everyone can pitch in? Instead of talking BS on the news channels why does not the media pick up the case of insuring each and every Indian so that we do not have to face such situations?
January 3, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Thats why people hesitate to help others out of compassion…ungratefulness is rampant it seems.
I like Odzer’s suggestion.
January 3, 2009 at 10:22 pm
if you refuse in such a situation, then the guild will overburden you… hence personally i feel that ungratefulness is a risk worth taking…
I have been taken advantage of before… yet it won’t change the very nature of me.
January 3, 2009 at 11:25 pm
The good deed was done and that should be the end of it. The problem is when we start expecting that the other person is should be eternally grateful.
ESIC was supposed to be the insurer for workers and other daily wage labourers. Things are no different there. You can see the patients literally being treated like animals.
Siphoning medicines and medical consumables, corruption in purchases are deep set problems plaguing our health delivery systems.
January 4, 2009 at 4:17 am
“How long can he survive? What is he supposed to do?”
Good that you picked up the economics argument. There is too much of the “noble profession” thing going around when it comes to doctors, teachers etc; as if every one else who works is some kind of scumbag. Worse, “noble” is used like a millstone – now that the elevation to greatness is complete, the profession should be carried out as if it were some kind of charity.
Everything is a business, and what is “profit” to a businessman is salary to a salaried person. Time people understood that.
“I can’t figure out the moral of the story.”
Don’t help people would be my answer, but if I move beyond my misanthropy, there are two issues involved-
1. Did your friend know that the accountant would not be able to pay back the loan based on his current salary?
If yes, what was he thinking? Business and charity don’t go well together – never. And compassion = charity.
If no, then the accountant’s explanation (except the blame) makes sense as long as he plans to repay the loan, and your friend should accept it.
2. If your friend had refused the loan, the government hospital thing might have happened, but since people are people, I can say without any doubt in my mind that the accountant would have borne a grudge against your friend for not having helped him out, and would have quit the job (or done something else) in any case.
The moral is – help people if you can afford to do so (know people who bankrupt themselves being charitable), but don’t have unreasonable expectations from those whom you help; something along the lines of what Mavin says.
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odzer,
Yes, people pay taxes in some form or another, and it would be easy to allocate a percentage of the collections to insurance. But national insurance for every citizen means any one who gets hurt or is in need of medical treatment should be able to walk into any hospital and get free treatment, which is just another way of saying – universal health care.
Its a nice thought in theory, though, being a staunch capitalist, I don’t subscribe to it. Practically speaking, its a question of resources – x-ray machines, MRI and other advanced equipment, drugs, blood, plasma, saline, injections, ambulances, clinics, operating rooms, and doctors. The actual cost of universal health insurance would be equal to the amount that is required to acquire and maintain – or pay for at market rates (if the government pays for everything, there won’t be any market left though) – everything that I have mentioned, and then some more. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this hypothetical figure exceeds our current annual budget revenues (Rs. 750,884 crores) – Rs. 7,509 per person is not a large figure when it comes to health care.
The solution, at least a partial one, lies in more freedom – getting rid of a paternalistic state that taxes people to penury and allows the monies so collected to be siphoned off. Bare minimum taxation and zero government regulations (as opposed to private ones) will leave people with more money in their hands to spend as they wish including charity for those who can’t afford care. The present system, or enlarging it, is not the solution.
January 4, 2009 at 12:03 pm
shocking!
January 4, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Prerna:
They say in Hindi – neki kar, dariya mein daal. Clearly many haven’t heard of it. Why should a person, who helps voluntarily, then expect eternal gratefulness? The key word is ‘voluntarily’.
The moral of both the stories is: Indians need to learn to say ‘no’.
We do not say ‘no’ often enough. We find the word ‘no’ offensive. We aren’t smart enough to separate a transaction from a person so we take ‘no’ as personal rejection. We don’t have the courage of our convictions to incur someone else’s displeasure even if we know we are right.
If we said ‘no’ often, we would not have expectations of eternal gratefulness that seem to drive a whole range of bizarre behaviours in our society.
And if we do not wish to say ‘no’, we need to learn some grace and decency, both as givers and receivers of kindness.
January 4, 2009 at 12:44 pm
@ Aristotle : Plenty of capitalist countries have National Health Insurance. I am not saying it would be ‘free’ but it should be free for some segments. One should be able to pay as per their income. Tax the rich more. Capitalist or not that is the standard way of doing things. In any case it has nothing to do with communism or capitalism. Public health is always a government domain. Even if you leave it to the private companies you will need governmental regulation.
May be we can have private insurance as well to compete with national health insurance. People who want to pay more and have access to medical care in a faster way can opt for that. However leaving the most vulnerable and poor people completely uncovered is unacceptable. I never said that the government should foot all the bill. The government can certainly collect the funds and even assign private companies to run the insurance. The question that I raised was at the moment most of us are uncovered. This has to change, the way you want to cover is a secondary issue. In any case staunch capitalism or staunch communism both never work but that is another debate.
January 4, 2009 at 8:58 pm
odzer,
“Plenty of capitalist countries have National Health Insurance.”
If by capitalist countries, you refer to mixed economies like the US, UK etc – where the government controls every aspect of normal life and trade, then you are right.
“I am not saying it would be ‘free’ but it should be free for some segments. One should be able to pay as per their income.”
I understand that people sympathize with those who cannot afford to pay for essentials of life or for medical treatment, but I don’t understand why people who earn more should be forced to pay for those who earn less, or don’t earn at all. There is nothing standard about forcing people to be charitable.
It all comes down to rights, and their violation. If the State thinks that some people ought to sacrifice their property, wealth, or pleasures so that those can be handed out to others – and these some people happen to be “rich”, its no surprise that the same State will forcibly acquire land from farmers – be it in Gujarat, or in Bengal. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
“Public health is always a government domain. Even if you leave it to the private companies you will need governmental regulation.”
“Is” and “ought to” are not the same; just because the government has always interfered in the market does not mean that it has the right to do so. And the same applies to regulation.
“The government can certainly collect the funds and even assign private companies to run the insurance.”
Laissez-faire capitalism is a political system where the government is kept out of trade completely. Corporatism is a political system where (primarily) “private companies” loot the public using the government’s coercive powers – such as the power to extract a tax. Guess what system India practices? No wonder every one from real estate companies to airline companies wants the government to “rescue” them. By its very interference, governments distort the market mechanism.
“In any case staunch capitalism or staunch communism both never work but that is another debate.”
Communism won’t work unless people are held at gun point – it is against man’s nature. Capitalism hasn’t worked because people are afraid of freedom – their own, as well as that of others. And its not another debate because all the “social ills” we talk about – like the one under debate – are nothing but economic ills. Sixty years of Nehru’s “mixed economy” has left us where we are.
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Under our present condition, if an attempt is made to cover the whole population under some sort of health plan, it will be an unmitigated disaster. And that will be the case even if private companies are brought in to manage it, because our present crop of private companies knows how to game the system, like the American ones are doing – bribing politicians from the very top, to the very bottom – to get laws that are beneficial to them – passed.
Without a free market, private companies are just a little better than public ones – there is no competition because they are not competing for people’s attention, but for government attention.
—
“The question that I raised was at the moment most of us are uncovered. This has to change, the way you want to cover is a secondary issue.”
The concern is very valid, but the way it has to be targeted is extremely important – can’t leave it to a government that has a reverse Midas touch – everything it touches turns to dust.
January 4, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Prerna- In this specific case, one question comes to mind- Did the woman not know until the time of her delivery came that she would need to go to a hospital for this? Childbirth is not an emergency, it can be anticipated for months beforehand.
In my opinion the hospital authorities would have been within their rights to deny her admission. They should have done that instead of the subsequent drama.
January 5, 2009 at 9:17 am
Whatever a hospital’s compulsion be, they have no right to see a baby! That’s blasphemous.
January 5, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Today the medical profession has many ruthless money-minded people in it, just like other professions and after reading about the kidney racket doctor nothing surprises me anymore. About the other incident, I think it’s ridiculous on the part of the man to blame the “help” he received. People leave jobs all the time and they often leave due to monetary reasons.
January 5, 2009 at 4:41 pm
In Medical profession is there is a very thin line between being professional , an being barbaric and some doctors sometimes tend to cross it.
A very Happy New Year to You!!!
January 5, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Doctors seem to be in the wrong profession.
If they say “No”, they are considered to be inhuman and if they do not say “No”, they won’t be able to make money. Obviously selling a child is not an option to settle the a.cs.
Better be inhuman than a criminal.
January 6, 2009 at 3:24 am
This is a very valid issue, because for every compassionate, and helpful plan that’s developed in our country, there are so many people who bend the rules, to unduly take advantage of it, that finally the people who really need the benefit, never really get it. That I think is exactly what happened in this woman’s case. However, selling off the baby is simply unacceptable.
Came to your blog through IHM, loved the few posts I read, and am blogrolling you.
January 6, 2009 at 5:06 am
[...] love life… so I explore discusses a shocking story -“a baby was sold by the doctors of a hospital because the parents could not [...]
January 6, 2009 at 10:22 am
I can see why you can’t figure out the moral of the story here. It’s too benign and inhuman! I can’t imagine in such profession, people can execute these judgments. Where are moral values these days? It’s despicable and unacceptable!
January 6, 2009 at 8:45 pm
@ Aristotle : We seem to have completely different divergent understanding of this. I do not think market is an all encompassing force or if it is always proper to leave everything to ‘market forces’. Humans do a lot of things that are not driven by profit. If profit was the only human motive Libraries or Public Parks or in the olden days Wells for travelers would all have not existed. Humans do what they want to do.
In my opinion health care should be extended to all. The quality of the health care in a country like India can only be improved by the system that is already in place. Everything else is Utopian at the moment. I am not going in to that kind of discussion here. It is irrelevant to her post in my opinion.
January 7, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Painful.
January 7, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Odzer, my desi Bakunin!!!
January 12, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Doctors are going through the severe criticism now-a-days. But they are not the only one to be blamed for this. Every seat in a private medical college was sold for an amount of 25 lakhs. With the education has become an investment, they are trying to recover the amounts. In this process they are forgetting basic things of Doctor profession, compassion and helping. Doctors, once seen as god are now being seen as a thief and many people were to go to them.
And for your friend, it’s a case of human nature these days which keeps on changing. Atlast we ourselves are the one to be blamed
January 12, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Kanagu, doctors are a part of the society and they are as good or bad as people from other proffesions.
Thanks and welcome @goofy mumma.
Manju, you have raised a very valid point, thanks.
Thanks Nita and Poonam.
Thanks Rahul and Reema.
Thanks Odzer and Aristotle The Geek for sharing your views.
Shefaly, I agree with you, we have to learn to say no.
Thanks Mavin and Vishesh.
February 21, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Prerna:
Here is a story about how lack of compassion similar to the hospital story can lead to someone losing her smile for real. In Germany. When the product was custom-made for her (so was unlikely to be useful to anyone else).
http://tinyurl.com/dhjzru
March 13, 2009 at 7:00 pm
[...] recently wrote about two stories where the kind people were later regretted saying ‘yes’. This [...]