As Union Health Minister Gulam Nabi Azad is busy in solving the Telangana crisis, India's health service is deteriorating more and more.
With Azad's ministry not initiating any new reforms for urban or rural health care in the last few years, the country's poor are facing hard times.
The glaring example of neglect of health service is right in New Delhi.
If you have serious injuries or a terminal disease, requiring urgent surgery, do not go to All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
Their operation theatres are working on less than half capacity. A Sharma (name changed), a peon working in a private firm, went to AIIMS with cancer and acute jaundice. He has been diagnosed by AIIMS only. He needs to be operated upon within 10/15 days. AIIMS, as it happens in many cases, told him to come in the last week of August and he was also warned that he may have to wait further. Sharma, a father of three growing daughters, is extremely worried.
A senior doctor and head of department of an important faculty, told him, on Tuesday that half of the operation theatres of AIIMS are closed down for renovation. Almost 50 percent staff in the surgical department are on leave. There are more than 30 patients who are already admitted and waiting desperately for operations. Their condition is worse than Sharma's.
AIIMS is the last hope for poor people to get excellent medical advice. From nooks and corners of India, poor patients flock to AIIMS but the management has not taken care to have alternate arrangements to ensure that inspite of renovations, their capacity to offer services do not suffer.
AIIMS is in shambles due to demand exceeding supply.
Shrma will have to go to other government-run hospitals which are not comparable to AIIMS or else pay a hefty amount and get admitted to a private hospital.
The day Sharma was denied attention, the Supreme Court blasted big private hospitals. It's heartening to note that Sharma and lakhs of patients squatting in government hospitals without any care and facilities has someone who listens.
The apex court said that big private hospitals are acting like star hotels. Under the law, all five star hospitals are supposed to treat 25 percent outdoor and 10 percent indoor patients free of cost but most fudge figures of the services they are supposed to provide.
Justices R V Raveendran and A K Patnaik resonated Sharma's pain when they took head-on big private hospitals who are not sincere in treating free patients. The judges said, "You got land at a very cheap rate from the government because of this promise. If you admit a poor patient but ask him to pay for everything, it is not free treatment."
Lawyer Mukul Rohtagi was taken to task by the judges when he tried to put forward argument, on behalf of his rich clients, that the costly treatment and costlier medicines makes free treatment to poor unaffordable for private hospitals. The judges said, "It is not a hotel that your doctor will come, just say hello to the patient and then charge for everything. What is the fun in admitting poor patients in free beds and charging him exorbitant money. They are not beggars. They are entitled to free treatment as it is their land which has been given to you."
The judges pointed out forcefully that when hospitals are given free land they agree to provide free treatment to poor people but they don't adhere to their promises once they start operations.
Sharma still has some hope if the highest court of the land hears judiciously his and other poor patient's plea for medical services.
