Exposing the rot in Indian Healthcare

Dr Arun Gadre and Dr Abhay Shukla, the authors of the book, have also extensively documented other exploitative practices such as the 'target system', the concept of 'cuts' and how corporate hospitals work like industries with the sole motive of the 'shareholders' being "more and more profit".

Gadre and Shukla write how a senior super-specialist urologist had to leave a corporate hospital because its young MBBS CEO castigated him for not performing a particular operation for removal of a kidney stone where there was no need for any such procedure.

"These hospitals run on a perverted concept. Their only purpose is to satisfy the interests of their shareholders. The more profit the better. They go on prescribing needless investigations and surgeries," Gadre says.

Shukla says a person had to sell his apartment after a major corporate hospital came up with a bill of an astounding Rs 42 lakh for the treatment of his wife. "The actual expenditure cannot possibly even come close to this."

Both the authors, associated with Pune-based SATHI which specialises in policy advocacy related to health care, underline the need for a radical "restructuring" of the Medical Council of India (MCI), which they say has turned a blind eye to the systemic assualt on ethics in the medical profession.