Some 2,000 people mobbed and ransacked a hospital in southwestern China on Friday in a dispute over medical fees and shoddy health care practices, a human rights group said Sunday…The unrest erupted after a 3-year-old boy died in the hospital, where he had been rushed for emergency treatment after swallowing pesticides. There were conflicting reports about how much medical care the boy received…The human rights group said in a faxed statement that essential medical care was denied the boy until his grandfather, who was taking care of him, could raise cash to pay for the treatment. The boy died after the grandfather left to raise money, the group said.
More info in this NYT article (subscription may be required). Although the government has pledged to spend more on health care for hundreds of millions of China’s poor,
…the government has so far provided relatively little money for hospital care in poverty-stricken areas. It has experimented with ways to provide a social insurance scheme for people who are not employed by major companies, including most of the 800 million people classified as peasants, but has yet to roll out any national plan.
This story brought back memories of Russia, where health care is nominally free, but you often have to ‘grease the hands of doctors’ to get any decent service. You often hear stories about people left out to fend for themselves because they can’t afford to pay for medicines or pay their share to stay in a hospital. In fact, free healthcare is guaranteed in the Russian Constitution (!!!), but like many things in Russia, there is a disconnect between what’s written in the books and what takes place in real life. In real life, you have to pay ‘under the table’ to get the most basic of the services. A more detailed look at Russia’s health care problems is here.
Unlike in China, where public protests are on the rise, cases of people taking it to the streets in protest over the conditions in Russia are still rare. Corruption is becoming so institutionalized there, that even calls for action from President Putin achieve little. It seems that in many cases people are learning how to live with corruption, not figuring out how to combat it.
More on corruption and health care from Transparency International.
Published Date: November 13, 2006