Graft leaves Indian health care ailing

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Dinner-table talk among the middle class and rich Indians often turns to horror stories of doctors getting kickbacks in return for an expensive operation or diagnostic procedure. Or of highly paid doctors in private hospitals given "quotas" by the management. The alleged quotas refer to the number of patients, tests and procedures they need to prescribe to generate the required revenue for the hospital. Now an Australian doctor, Dr David Berger, has stirred up a national debate about corruption in Indian health care with an article in the British Medical Journal. Based on six months as a volunteer physician in an Indian hospital, Dr Berger describes unnecessary X-Rays, CT scans, MRIs, hysterectomies and stent procedures, routine bribe-taking, and "needless deaths".

Read the story by Amrit Dhillon in The Straits Times.

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