SUMMARY
‘I believe very unhappy seeing her… It isn’t simple for me as a result of her frame has modified… It does no longer appear to be a frame anymore; it’s extra like a stone… We plead with the sanatorium to offer us the frame. We will be able to by no means have the ability to pay the cash regardless of how lengthy they maintain it.’ – Franciska Wanjiru, whose mom’s frame used to be detained for non-payment of a invoice at Nairobi Girls’s Medical institution, Kenya.
Throughout low- and middle-income nations, many non-public for-profit hospitals are systematically exploiting and abusing sufferers and denying them healthcare, inflicting hardship, struggling and impoverishment. A lot of those hospitals are funded by way of Eu governments and the International Financial institution Team.
In those hospitals, sufferers are imprisoned for no longer paying their expenses. The proper to emergency care is denied. Remedy is impossibly dear. Sufferers entitled to loose care are as a substitute driven into poverty, having to pay prime charges to get right of entry to well being services and products. All through the COVID-19 pandemic, a few of these hospitals behaved appallingly, profiteering from other folks’s ache and concern within the face of this new illness.
Oxfam’s analysis for this paper maps the cash path between the improvement finance establishments (DFIs) of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the EU and the International Financial institution Team to for-profit non-public healthcare suppliers within the International South. By way of number one analysis and detailed nation case research, in addition to broader desk-based opinions and investigative searches of just about 400 investments, Oxfam assesses whether or not DFI guarantees to advance common well being protection (UHC) are being delivered and whether or not tasks to give protection to rights are being upheld. The analysis unearths obviously that they aren’t.
As a substitute, taxpayers’ cash is getting used to again dear, for-profit non-public hospitals that block, bankrupt and even detain sufferers who can’t pay – and all this with finances mandated to battle poverty and succeed in construction objectives.
