Red tape lethal than dengue fever
Red tape lethal than dengue fever
Eva C. Komandjaja and Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The City Council urged the Jakarta Administration on Monday to
cut down on the bureaucratic red tape on disbursements for
impoverished dengue fever victims, who are unable to get timely
or professional medical treatment without the money.
"In such a state of emergency, the Jakarta Health Agency must
bypass all its normal, and unnecessary, paperwork so it can speed
up the procedures for medical bill reimbursement (paid to city-
run hospitals from the agency over medical costs for poor
patients)," councillor Syamsidar Siregar of the National Mandate
Party (PAN) said in a hearing between with the council's
Commission E overseeing people's welfare and health.
The commission recommended that the administration use the Rp
800 billion (US$95.2 million) emergency fund to help cover all
costs needed to curb the dengue outbreak. The city must get the
council's approval to use the emergency fund.
Long bureaucratic procedures have forced city-run hospitals to
provide just the bare minimum of treatment for patients without
money.
Unlike public health centers that each received Rp 150 million
in cash for their operational costs to combat the outbreak,
hospitals must cover the patients' costs first, then deal with
the time-consuming mountain of red tape to get reimbursed from
the city health agency. The reimbursement fund is taken from the
city budget for poor families' health needs and amounts to Rp 40
billion.
Deputy Director of Service of the city-run Tarakan Hospital,
Sutirto Basuki, said that his hospital had to lower their
standard of treatment for dengue fever victims who could not pay
as a result of the backlog of reimbursement requests that they
were still waiting for.
"We don't have enough money to even do blood tests. We have to
use our own (operational) budget to pay for the tests and still
limit them," he said.
Basuki said that instead of conducting a standard blood test
for a dengue fever patient every two hours, the hospital extended
the period for each test to a minimum of six hours for the
sickest patients.
Widianingsih, a resident of Kebon Jeruk, West Jakarta,
confirmed that the nurse took the blood samples from her son Ali
every six hours.
The Ministry of Health has instructed doctors to conduct blood
tests on dengue fever patients every two hours for three
consecutive days. If a patient's condition improves, the blood
test can be done every 12 hours.
Another city-run hospital Budhi Asih in Cawang, East Jakarta,
also had to use its other parts of its budge for poor dengue
fever patients.
"We are still in the process of trying to get reimbursed from
the health agency. We are using the hospital's funds to cover the
costs," said Srihati Sinulingga, an official of the hospital.
Since the dengue fever outbreak hit Jakarta earlier this year,
the death toll has reached at least 58, while there were 7,366
known reported cases as of Monday.
Councillor Ahmad Heryawan of the Justice Party urged the
agency not to use the Rp 40 billion allocated for poor families
on dengue victims, but to save it for later.
"If that fund is used for the poor dengue fever patients, we
are afraid that the allotment for poor families to get subsidies
for other medical treatment will be reduced," he argued.