- 06 Feb 2013 12:14
#14166123
Looks like a case of government good intentions to help the poor by working in conjunction with the private sector, gone wrong due to free-market-healthcare greed.
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BBC wrote:The Indian women pushed into hysterectomies
Thousands of Indian women are having their wombs removed in operations that campaigners say are unnecessary and only performed to make money for unscrupulous private doctors.
Sunita is uncertain of her exact age but thinks she's about 25 years old. I met her in a small village in Rajasthan, north-west India, surrounded by chewing cattle and birdsong. She was covered in jewellery, from a nose-stud and rings to bangles which jangled when she gestured with her hand.
Her face hardens when she tells me about her operation.
"I went to the clinic because I had heavy bleeding during menstruation," she says.
"The doctor did an ultrasound and said I might develop cancer. He rushed me into having a hysterectomy that same day."
Sunita says she was reluctant to have the operation straightaway and wanted to discuss it with her husband first. She says the doctor said the operation was urgent and sent her for surgery just hours later.
More than two years have passed since that day but Sunita says she still feels too weak to work or look after her children.
When other local women crowded round, I asked how many of them had undergone hysterectomies. More than half raised their hands at once. Village leaders said about 90% of the village women have had the operation, including many in their 20s and 30s.
The doctors generally charge around $200 for the operation, which often means the families have to sell cattle and other assets to raise the money.
[...]
Once the removed uterus - and any biopsy tissue - has been destroyed, it becomes hard to prove that the operation wasn't justified.
But it is clear that something strange and deeply worrying is happening.
Reports from a handful of Indian states, including Rajasthan, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, suggest that an extraordinarily high number of women are having their uteruses removed, including many below the age of 40.
[...]
To ease the burden on the rural poor, the Indian government launched a national health insurance scheme, the RSBY, in 2008. Under the scheme, families living below the poverty line can receive treatment worth up to 30,000 rupees ($550) each year from designated private hospitals, which claim the costs directly from the state.
But in some states, critics say the scheme appears to be encouraging unnecessary hysterectomies, as unethical private clinics exploit the vulnerable poor, using them as a means to tap into government funds.
In Samastipur, a district in the northern state of Bihar, initial figures suggested that more than a third of operations carried out under the scheme were hysterectomies. The district magistrate, Kundan Kumar, became so concerned about these figures that he invited women who had had the operation to attend a government medical camp last August, where they received an independent evaluation from government doctors.
The report from the camp suggests that of 2,606 women who were examined, 316 - about 12% - had had their uteruses removed unnecessarily.
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Looks like a case of government good intentions to help the poor by working in conjunction with the private sector, gone wrong due to free-market-healthcare greed.
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