Public health care needs a cure for touts

The multiple roles that the accused in the Kolkata doctor’s rape and murder juggled in the government hospital where the latter was employed, expose how the inadequacy of public health care infrastructure and personnel has led to a network of touts and middlemen. This is true even in the best government facilities, including in the national Capital. Touts lubricate everything at these facilities, creaking under the massive footfalls they receive, from booking ambulances to even arranging for blood. Informal as this ecosystem is, it goes unregulated and leaves patients and their families with little recourse when things go wrong. This has also created a shadow economy of kickbacks and inducements involving public-sector personnel who serve as feeder lines for the private sector (nursing homes when the patients fail to find a bed in the government hospital, diagnostics facilities when the waiting time in public facilities runs into weeks.) Monitoring and weeding out touts, even when attempted, does little to cleanse the system permanently, given the sheer number of patients seeking access and attention, desperately grasping at straws.