India’s medical system has been openly accepted by the Kolappa Mentorship Committee. According to a recent study published in the news, just guess what percentage of surgeries are being faked in India. Well, a freaking 44% of the surgeries are being faked, which means almost half of the surgeries are being faked.
These surgeries are completely unwanted and are being done only for the purpose of earning money. The same report had also categorized these surgeries and told which surgeries are done in India: Heart surgeries at 55, Uterus surgeries at 48, Cancer surgeries at 48. But knee replacement surgeries and 45 C section surgeries are being completed unnecessarily only for the purpose of making money.
The only reason is corporatization of hospitals i.e. making hospitals target and profit centric like corporate companies. This is a very interesting research paper in which researchers Interviewed 43 specialist doctors from top hospitals of Maharashtra, senior government ex-officials and managers of corporate hospitals so that they could publicly expose the target base structure being run in these hospitals like companies and the results were shocking and most First of all, let’s talk about salaries, so the respondents who participated in the research said
that there is a huge difference in the salaries of doctors working in hospitals, so much so that newbie doctors get a monthly salary of Rs 1 lakh but senior doctors get Rs. This salary even reaches Rs 1 crore per month. Now the question here is that why such a big difference because there is a difference in their targets also.
A senior ophthalmic says that they have to manage 1000 patients every month no matter how high end they are. Another gynecologist respondent said that the pressure of targets increases a lot at the end of the month due to which they have to hospitalize even the out patients i.e. OPD patients unnecessarily and As a result, targets are met by recommending more and more surgeries because the target here is 1000 patients.
Now think for yourself, in every hospital, every department like ophthalmic targets are given, then just imagine hospitals profit and are loss and by the way these targets. Are Taken Very Seriously In the same research, many senior doctors had said that if a doctor misses his targets for two consecutive months, then just like corporates, he will get a verbal warning or will be given a memo and even after that if If targets are not met then off course Tata buys bye so here you can see how hospital industry should be a service industry
in which customer patient should be top priority but here profit is becoming top priority and by the way these targets are also tracked. Hospital Hired Management Professionals i.e. MBS who work like Operating Officers, Executive Supervisors in big MNCs, these people regularly keep track of these targets of the doctors and of course here the doctors also complete these targets with equal dedication.
Because as we saw, their salary is very high but their high paying job is mostly on contractual basis and so to renew that contract and decide their new pay scale, their last year’s targets are seen. Which unfortunately forces these doctors to do illegal work till AIIMS. Now, to understand the illegal practices of the medical field thoroughly, we have taken all this information from two very prominent doctors.
The first one is Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan Awardee Doctor BM Hegde, who An article was written and there is a reference to that article and the second reference we have taken from a book called Decent Diagnosis by Dr. Arun Dare and Dr. Abhay Shukla but despite searching a lot, we could not find this book publicly available but we found an article by Business Insider.
Found in which some main excerpts from that book are available. Starting with the first cam which is so disgusting that even humanity should feel shy. Keeping Dead Patients Alive. Times of India has published a report on many such cases in which doctors kept dead patients alive.
They continue their treatments by pretending that they are alive so that they can make more money and then finally make the truth public. In a case published in TI itself, a hospital kept their 14 year old brain dead child for a month without informing the parents. The child who was dead was kept on the ventilator for a month and was declared alive and the expenditure on the ventilator was generated and later the hospital was proved guilty and his family was given ₹ lakh compensation.
Now ₹ lakh monetary compensation has to be given to the hospital. But you and I also know that at that time, when the parents would have heard this, when they would have come to know about this truth, then what would have happened to them. Now, apart from the ventilator scams, according to the article of Dr.
Hegde, many times doctors have been on dead patients. They also make excuses for doing emergency surgeries, for which money is deposited urgently from the family and then the matter is closed by showing that the patient died during the surgery, meaning the patient was already dead, but on the pretext of surgery, you get the money.
They are taken and then later it is shrugged off by saying diet during surgery. Now friends, the second big scam comes here which is the scam of insurance policy. I was shocked to know that according to the recent survey, Indians at 68 are under insured, meaning. They have an insurance policy but that policy is not able to help them at the time of need and do you know why because insurance companies use many loop holes so that when you go to make a claim, they get at least the money in that difficult time.
So let us understand them in some detail today so that you do not get trapped in these loop holes while buying insurance for yourself, so first of all you have to pay attention to what type of insurance you have i.e. Individual Health Insurance Plan where Only you are covered, none of your family members are covered or it is a family floater plan where you have to pay the premium only once but after that if any member of the family needs insurance then the insurance company will bear the expenses.
Number Two will cover pre and post hospitalization expenses i.e. the expenses for tests etc. before admission and the expenses for medicines and tests even after discharge. It is important to pay attention to whether your company will cover all this or not Number Three Day Care Treatment is now cataract for example or chemotherapy or any minor surgery does not require overnight stay in the hospital so you have to ensure that such day care basically a limit What happens is that your insurer charges you regarding room expenses, so suppose if you have taken an insurance policy of ₹ 5 lakhs whose room rent cap is only at ₹ 1, which actually happens in many policies, then if your room is at ₹ 1000000 per day. So, you will get only Rs. 5000 from the company on 1st of Rs.
5 lakhs, you will have to pay the remaining Rs. 5000 from your pocket. Number Five: Many problems can arise at the time of claiming pre-existed insurance. Number Six: Corporate health insurance. Your employer may have already taken out one for you, but experts usually advise that you should not rely only on corporate health insurance as their covers range only from ₹ to ₹ lakh and this insurance also ceases to exist as soon as you leave the company.
If it gets cancelled, then the cashless network hospital is at number seven. Now here you have to pay a lot of attention to the cashless transaction, which means that your insurance company should directly pay the bill to that hospital and not you have to pay the bill first. And then later the company reimburses you that amount, this increases the hassle a lot, plus the chances of the amount going up or down also increases.
Also ideally, the bigger the hospital network in your policy, the better it will be because as many Your treatment will be valid in more and more hospitals. So now friends, you have understood what things should be kept in mind while taking a health insurance, but now how will you ensure that you are buying the right policy for yourself or not.
Every year 2000 Indians sell their kidneys. A heart-wrenching case related to this organ trafficking came to light in 2019 due to which a A big trafficking nexus worth Rs 100 crore was exposed, so what happened was that a Kanpur woman named Sangeeta Kashyap was taken to Delhi by a friend of her husband on the pretext of getting her a job.
On reaching Delhi, she was told that the company would stop giving her a job. First she wants a complete health checkup for which she will have to go to the hospital. Now guess which hospital it was. Well, it is a very big chain of hospitals whose name is a bit risky for me, but still for your information I will tell you about it.
The name was Photos Moving Forward. Sangeeta found this medical procedure completely natural because many companies consider health certificate as priority for recruitment, but call it coincidence or divine intervention. When Sangeeta was lying on her bed, some doctors were talking next to her and They mistakenly referred him as a donor in front of him.
Now this word suddenly struck Sangeeta and she started realizing that something was wrong with her, so after the doctors left, she secretly got up and ran away from the hospital. After this incident, the husband’s friend, instead of apologizing, instead sent goons to Sangeeta and started threatening her to pay ₹ 5000000.
Now apparently Sangeeta got scared of this and filed a police complaint, after which the police made a big investigation into organ trafficking. The nexus was caught. Police has clearly mentioned in their charge sheet that in this nexus, everyone from the police, personal photos, doctors, hospital administration staff, medical support staff were involved, that is, they knew that Sangeeta’s kidney was being sold illegally but did not know about it.
Despite this, not a single person has raised voice on this. What actually happens in such cases is that first of all, everyone is silenced by paying money and secondly, even if someone has to raise voice, these big corporate hospitals have very strong legal teams. And there are also connections due to which no common man wants to get involved in all this.
Common man thinks that it would be better to eat money and keep quiet and this is not the only case in India. There are numerous newspapers like Reuters Times of India, First Post, Indian Express etc. Media channels have reported such numerous cases and you will not believe that in many cases the donors are not even given their fees after the transplant.
Now the fourth scam which we will talk about is being done very foolishly by the majority of the doctors. Hospital Referral Have you seen that your family doctor or any general physician unnecessarily asks the patients to get admitted to the hospital immediately? Well, they say this because they are referral members of big corporate hospitals like Apollo Hospitals, in fact Apollo Hospitals.
Chennai’s Chief Nephrologist Dr MK Mani himself has said that it is an open secret for doctors to get money for referrals. In fact, it is quoted in an investigation by Times of India that big five star hospitals like Kokila become Apollo doctors. In fact, they run referral programs. In the same article, it is also mentioned that Mumbai’s famous Kokila Ben Hospital has written a letter to the Maharashtra Medical Council and admitted that the hospital was sending forms to the doctors to get enrolled in their referral program.
In which literally the referee doctor gets ₹ lakh for referring 40 patients annually, ₹ lakh for referring 50 patients and ₹ 22.5 lakh for 75 patients. Basically their target is to get the patient admitted to the hospital whether anything has happened to them or not. Send it to be done and on doing so, they get the referral amount which is legally credited directly into the doctors’ accounts in the name of professional charges.
Now in this way basically this process is not visible to any government agency but again. Dr MK Man had complained about this to the Medical Council in 1995 with full proof, but as expected, no legal action was taken on this. Now friends, this is the next scam, it is quite simple and easy but doctors earn profit of crores from this.
They are doing the diagnosis scam, so this is the case of December 2017, when the Income Tax Department had raided some diagnosis labs in Bangalore, then undisclosed income of about Rs 100 crores was recovered from all those labs, out of which in some labs even Rs 50 crores were recovered. Cash and 32 kg of gold were also found and further investigation revealed that this amount of ₹ crore was kept by the labs for giving reference to doctors.
These same diagnosis labs give a commission of Rs. 40 to the doctors for patient referral, basically to the patient. Whether something has happened or not, the doctors send them to these labs and forcefully get them tested and in turn, some diagnosis labs even conduct a direct sync test of the patient i.e. fake blood test.
To put it in simple words, in this sync test, there are only one or two labs. They test your blood or other samples and produce pre-determined reports and that is why this lab business has become so profitable that today more than 1 lakh medical labs are operational in India but only 1000 of them are accredited.
That is, it is government registered, this accreditation certifies that the lab from which you are getting the test done will give you absolutely safe and reliable reports, but still, there are many unregistered labs present in the market. Now friends, another big scam of our medical system. It is being run at the grass root level for which 20 big pharmaceutical companies like Sun Pharma, Glen Mark Pharma are spending Rs.1000 crores only on doctors. Down to Earth Magazine wrote about this entire scam on 23 January 2019 in The Department of Pharmaceuticals. I came to know about this through an RTI filed by DT, so according to DT, 20 big pharmaceutical companies of India have asked the doctors and corporate hospitals to sell only their medicines on prescription.
Now the doctors have to sell the medicines of that particular pharma company. Vacations and cash incentives are given for doctors and companies like USV Limited offer 3 lakh cash to every doctor for trips like Australia trip or Vancouver trip. Now here a different nexus of hospitals and pharma companies is going on. If the hospitals then directly take their profits.
India Today has exposed this cam in 2017. They found that pharma companies sell medicines to hospitals at discounted rates and the hospitals sell those medicines to patients at literally double triple prices. India Today provided proof of this. It was told that M Cure Oncology Pharma sells its Temi Cure 250 mg medicine to an Amritsar base cancer hospital for ₹ 1,950 and the same medicine is sold to hospital patients for ₹ 8647 and all hospitals do this.
For details, you can visit India Today. You can see the medicine scam report. Now friends, after hearing all this, I am shocked and you must be wondering how such scams are running openly in India. Well, there are two major reasons for this, the first of which is the lax monitoring body India.
Medical Council of India (MCI) is the top medical body whose job is to oversee medical education and ethics of medical professionals, but this body has proved to be a complete failure in following its duties and the Standing Committee of the Government itself has said this in the year 2016. A government standing committee was set up regarding the working of MCI.
That committee clearly told that MCI, forgetting its mandate, is only focusing on granting licensing to medical colleges and is completely ignoring its other important role, medical ethics. The committee said that there should be two hard bifurcations of the duties of MCI in which one department will focus on medical education and the other hard department will focus on the ethical conduct of medical professionals and if this is not done then the Indian medical system will soon collapse.
The major reason here is the lack of awareness. Actually, Indian doctors violate the ethical regulations of IMC every day and we do not even know about it. Like the number one no drug brand in prescription clause 1.5 says that only generic medicines should be given to doctors for scrutiny fee.
It is mandatory to tell that they cannot disclose the fees during the operation or treatment. Many such rules have been explicitly written in this document but because we do not have the knowledge about it, the doctors openly violate the rules. Now as we have seen friends. Even after being banned, doctors are continuing their unethical practices. To improve this, according to Business Insider News, the government will have to take some immediate actions like action, first of all the government should appoint the Parliamentary Committee sitting on MCI
and the National Coalition of Ethical Doctors. And all the recommendations of health activists will have to be implemented immediately. Second, every state should amend the National Clinical Establishments Act at its individual level and add a clause to protect patients’ rights and a grievance mechanism.
And the third and most important recommendation has been made by the Health Ministry. Consumer awareness campaign like health rights awareness mass media campaign should be run so that all the citizens will be aware but friends I think that all the doctors are not the same and today because of those unethical doctors we stigmatize all the doctors so friends this is really There is a very complex eco system in which we have only a few limited things in our hands and if the government brings strong policies and puts in strong reinforcements, then obviously the
environment will keep getting better, but till then, common citizens like you and I will take some precautionary measures. We can take majors who will safeguard us. Prefer old surgeons over number one young surgeons from these practices because young doctors have to pay back their loans, so they can overcharge, plus they also have to build reputation for their career.
And that is why it would be better to go to old doctors who may suggest operations only in rare cases. The second suggestion I would like to give is that you should always go from a doctor to a doctor like a physician to a surgeon because if you go to a surgeon there is a high chance that he will Will suggest surgery compared to a physician who will try to treat before medicine.
So friends, these were some basic measures but you must have got an overall idea of what are the practices in the medical field so that you do not get any odds anywhere. So you can safeguard yourself from these bad practices. Have you ever had such an instance where a hospital or a clinic has overcharged you or has any bad practice happened with you? If yes, then tell us in the comments below.
