RIGHTEOUS LIE: the bread and butter of doctors and private hospitals/Clinics.

RIGHTEOUS LIE: the bread and butter of doctors and private hospitals/Clinics.

“Dr. K thinks that he is still working at the Ministry of Health,” my colleagues used to say, and they would laugh. I was called to the office of the manager/owner of Al Ahli Medical Polyclinic many times to instill in me that working in a government hospital (where I spent more than 20 years, from 1980 to 2000) is different from working in a private clinic. It took me 3 years (this is my 8^th year) battling not only my employer but also my conscience, until I was slowly absorbed by the system, albeit to a certain extent that is reasonably acceptable to my moral sense of righteousness.

I spent more than half of my entire life in this town, so how, for instance, will I write unnecessarily expensive diagnostic examinations for someone I have known for quite a while? My other dilemma is overseas foreign workers from South Asia who will spend half of their monthly wage on an unnecessary abdominal ultrasound. Although I detest what the other foreign doctors are doing, I accepted it as a necessary evil until I realized that it was no evil: it is a righteous lie. Doctors need to exaggerate the diagnosis to convince patients to submit to more expensive examinations. Although doctors do not want you to be well, they don’t like you to be seriously ill. They want to cure you to make you happy and grateful. They hope that something abnormal will come out of your laboratory examinations, so they will know for sure what is wrong with you, and if necessary, ask for more expensive tests. This is not the truth; it is the reality of private enterprise.

When mandatory medical insurance was instituted in Saudi Arabia, not only for foreign workers but also for all Saudi citizens employed in private and semi-private companies/corporations, I saw it as a godsend for my moralizing ego (LOL). Even then, I was slow to adapt to the new realities. Only when I realized that owners of Insurance companies fly around in private jets and party on private yachts did I change my attitude. If you come to me with a complaint of recurrent abdominal pain, I will send you for an abdominal ultrasound and other tests, and if our clinic has a CT scan, which we do not have (fortunately lol), I will send you for one. In this way, everybody is happy, including the patients. (I just got a call from our pharmacist.) He is sending me two patients, meaning two poor, sick Indians with Insurance cards that belong to someone else. Sigh…! My moral dilemma.

I don’t judge people who run private clinics/hospitals. While they have a responsibility to the public, they have a more pressing responsibility to the institution they run, including stockholders demanding profitable dividends, employees, and, yes, the monthly payroll. To raise money, they need to cheat patients and insurance companies in so many different ways (male patients pay for pregnancy tests in the USA [lol]).

I don’t believe it is fair to condemn Pacific International Hospital (http://truthaboutpacificinternationalhospitalpng.wordpress.com/) based on the experiences of one or a few individuals that occurred some time ago. If you are a highly moral person, you must never work in a private hospital/clinic, because you will be severely disappointed. You must seek employment in a government-run hospital, where you try every persuasion you can muster to drive away patients wanting admission, which is the opposite of private enterprise, where you employ the art of persuasion, including white lies, to keep patients admitted. In a government hospital, everybody is well…go home. In a private hospital, everybody is dying…stay.

Back in the days of “MEDICARE” insurance in the Philippines, the company was bankrupted by small clinics and hospitals that made the insurance company their bread and butter, collecting hospital bills for people who never got sick.

https://www.amazon.com/Nosca-Khalid/e/B01NA7APYQ

NLK