Salud en India

La gente vota con el bolsillo:

In spite of his limited means, B. Ramachandraiah did not visit the dank, dilapidated primary government health centre on the outskirts of the town. Instead, the 50-year-old turned to a 25-bed private clinic, where M. Pullareddy, the physician living upstairs, diagnosed him as suffering from malaria.

For Mr Ramachandraiah’s family, the doctor’s Rs50 ($1.10) consultation fee and Rs200 for blood tests was money well spent. “Nobody is taking care of you in a government hospital,” said the ailing man’s uncle. “Even if we don’t have money, we come and request the doctor to treat us.”

The decision by many poor urban and rural Indians such as Mr Ramachandraiah to opt for private care reflects what Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, calls the “premature privatisation of healthcare” that is taking place in India amid the de facto collapse of the cash-strapped government system."