Miserable condition of health care in Punjab hospitals is scandalous: Channi

Chandigarh, May 7, 2016: The Punjab Congress Legislature Party leader Mr Charanjit Singh Channi today asserted the miserable condition of government health centres and hospitals not only ridiculed the claims of Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal of taking the state to higher orbit of development but it was also part of a big scandal to promote private players at the cost of the government hospitals. Poor people had been left to the mercy of the private hospitals that charge hefty amounts that the common man just can’t afford.

“Nothing can be more shocking than that the fact that the health care units from dispensaries to primary health centres to once premier institutions like Rajendra Hospital in Patiala have been turned into junk yards in the absence of even basic staff, medicines and other facilities. The Badal government has never bothered to equip health care units even in cancer prone areas. Even where doctors have been posted, they prefer to work on deputation at some convenient place to them although the basic facilities to the patients are not available even in such preferred centres”, he added. He said the medical college hospitals at Patiala and Amritsar were at once premier institutions in the state.

Mr Channi demanded that a high level probe monitored by a sitting judge of the Punjab and Haryana High should be ordered to go into deeper in this scandalous case of willful neglect of the public sector health facilities to promote big private players. He said most of these big hospitals had been allotted land by the state government at concessional rate. The people had a right to know the quid pro quo. These hospitals had only led to adding debt burden on the people in the state. Today almost the private hospitals are are looting the patients in all the big cities of Punjab. even they don’t fulfill the criteria of treating 25% poor patients. There is no regulatory body to check what they are charging from the patients.

He said the scandal did not stop here as it had other dimensions too. He said the design was to make health care unaffordable for the common man and then bring in some big insurance companies under the garb of providing relief to the people from specified categories.

Channi further added that this Government has left the primary and secondary health care in the government sector in lurch, there are no doctors available in the civil dispensaries, no technical staff for the labs, and no special surgeon. The patients are being sent to get the tests done from private players so that the staff gets their commission and its passed to their political bosses. The cleanliness in the government hospitals is again a feather in the cap of Badals. One can anytime visit and see himself the kind of quality upkeep the government hospitals are having.

Mr Channi said Mr Badal owed an explanation to the people for this deliberate ruination of the public health care system and bring in big private players.