Category: News

The allegations of loot by private hospitals in India are getting louder and louder. Even those in favour of free market economy suggest that some government regulations of private hospitals and private schools is a must.

Firstly about the government regulator. There are two complaints against private hospitals: They do unnecessary surgeries, and they charge huge amounts. So, how will the undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Truth, and Fairness know whether the surgery was required or not? How? How exactly? Will he hire another doctor to do the check? Why will the first corrupt doctor not bribe the second doctor doing the check? Why? I hope you do not believe in the joke that the doctor appointed by the undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Truth, and Fairness will be honest. Doctors come from the same society, study in the same colleges, and where they practice makes no difference to their integrity. So you will end up paying the salaries and bribes of undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Truth, and Fairness and his doctor, in addition to the fees of the corrupt doctor you are paying now.

About the second allegation, high charges. What are the reasonable charges? Which you can pay? Which the rich can pay? Which the upper middle class can pay? Which the middle class can pay? Which the landless labourer in the village can pay? What exactly are the reasonable charges. If you want that the undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Truth, Fairness, and Reasonable Charges should fix the fees of the private hospitals, remember that he reports to politicians and is answerable to Courts. Just one round of elections and three PILs in the Supreme Court, and charges will come to rupee ten for the registration and rupees hundred for the knee replacement. Everybody will become eligible for Medanta, there will be a ten year long waiting list, and you will die waiting for the rupees hundred knee replacement surgery.

Ridiculous, facetious, you say? In the UK and most OECD countries the medical services are totally free. But then the catch kicks in. In the UK, you may have to wait upto three weeks to see the General Practitioner (GP), the non-specialist who decides where you go next. And after that, the government target for a cancer patient, that is the patient who is suspected to have cancer by the GP, to see the specialist is 62 days. 62 days. In 62 days he should be able to see the cancer specialist after being suspected of having cancer and start his treatment. And even this target is not being met. For non-urgent but essential surgeries, the target is 18 weeks, and last year there was 40 lakh patient long waiting list waiting for surgeries. इतने दिन में तो AIIMS में ही नम्बर आ जाएगा आपका। क्यूँ हल्ला मचा रहे हो? AIIMS में नाम नोट कराओ और प्रतीक्षा करो। जिसको निजी अस्पताल में जाकर “लुटना” है उसके options की क्यूँ वाट लगा रहे हो?

Next consequence will be that the private hospitals will die. Capital goes where it sees profit. Both, the money Capital and human Capital goes where it sees highest returns. That is why choices for various Engineering branches is always changing, and the choice of Services in UPSC exams is always changing. Once people realise that private hospitals are making losses, they will not set up new hospitals, and existing ones will shut down. Young people will stop studying medicine. And your waiting list at the AIIMS will stretch to ten years in no time.

A country that was under socialist boot for 40 years should have known that government controls do not work. Government controls only make things costlier, more scarce, and eventually create black market. Black market attracts criminals. Once criminals enter the market, the country dies. No exceptions to the rule are found.

Some friends say that government control must not be there in any thing, but in medicine and in education it is a must. If government control is bad for everything else, how it can be good in medicine and education? Why can’t you think?

Now the solution. Solution is simple. Completely dismantle government control, regulation (regulation as in process regulation, not legal rules), permit, license, clearance, and NOC raj. Government control makes people corrupt. And if people are corrupt, doctors will not be honest either. With government control gone, you will have job explosion and huge growth in incomes, and your hospital charges will become a simple fraction of your income. No? You say no? Mumbai Delhi airfare was 25% more than my salary when I joined service. Today it is 7% of the salary of the new entrant in the same service. It happened not because of government regulation. But because government regulators were sent home. Retired. Sent off with their विदाई वाला नारीयल एंड माला। Exactly same will happen with hospital charges and school fees once all regulations of every sector of economy are removed: they will become absurdly small fractions of your salary.

Still you are not ready to agree? बहुत सताते हो यार। In India, home loan interest rates are 10% per annum and above. So, with a 10% interest rate and 20 year tenure if you take a 30 lakh home loan, you will pay 40 lakh interest in addition to the 30 lakh principal. In the US, the home loan rates are 4% and below. So if you obtain the same loan in the US, you will pay only about 11 lakh in interest, in addition to the principal. Lo, and voila, you save about 28 lakhs in interest and that will take care of all your medical expenses for the entire life. That is the magic of free market your Leftist doesn’t want you to know. And you will similarly save in every other expense. So, do not demand regulation. You demand regulation of hospitals, because you think you are the only pressure group. But pressure group are numerous, and once the principle is accepted that government knows the fair charges of a commodity/service, pressure groups force it to regulate everything. And economy dies. You job disappears. Your salary becomes a pittance. And all you are left with are the waiting lists, for everything.

And now the cruel and heartless part. If you think carefully, you will realise that we rarely fall sick before 60 years of age. May be some fevers. Very rare and unfortunate cases require hospitalisation and surgeries before the age of 60. And they are clean cases. Ailment is definitive, and treatments are straight forward. Allegations of overcharging mostly come in case of patients above 60 years of age, and become very common in the patients of above 70 years of age. Because doctors are also helpless in such cases. Senescence is something we do not talk about, but it is a reality. So doctor operates on such patients, and discovers something else also has gone non-responsive, some other organ is threatening to fail as a result of the surgery, and he is forced to operate, and relatives start crying “Loot, where is the government?” Fact is, avoid hospital if you are above 60 if the procedure is not going to add at least ten years to your life. And if you are above 70, do not go to hospital for surgeries. You will only end up bankrupting your family, and get between two to four years of life. Those too mostly of very poor quality of life. Children can not take such decisions for the elders. So, in the west government takes such decisions, indirectly. By putting them on waiting list.They depart the world, waiting for the surgery. In the US, even the closest relatives are not allowed to donate liver to the patient who requires liver transplant. They say they will not mutilate the healthy for the sake of the sick. So the patient waits for the liver in the cadaver programme, and if he survives the wait, he gets the liver. If government regulations come in India also, such patients will not start getting surgery on demand. They will only get waiting lists, but at least the children will not feel guilty. But children will also not get the healthcare they need even at young age.

We are genetically programmed to live the years assigned to us. Our lifestyle can shorten them, not increase. But even for a healthy life style but genetically programmed to depart at 70/80 years of age, medicine can add two to four years at the most, but will bankrupt the family in doing so. Maharana Pratap, Guru Govind Singh ji Maharaj, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, all departed around the age of 50. We still remember them. They lived a full life. If you have lived 70/80, you are lucky. But nothing spectacular is going to happen now. When the call from the maker comes, go gracefully, without bankrupting your family. And without destroying economy of the country by forcing government regulations.

On ZEE TV just saw two reports. First on a private hospital in Mumbai having Corona ward. Ward cleaner than a five star hotel room, every damn equipment available, staff fully provided.Second report was on KEM hospital Mumbai. No staff visible. Patients on the floor, because on the beds are dead bodies. The ward has not been swept in last 24 hours. Hardly any equipment by the beds. You become sick even looking at the bedding.What will Mumbaikars/Indians demand after watching the reports? Either of the following they will demand.

1. Government must nationalise the private hospitals. You dumbs, then private hospitals will no longer be private hospitals. They will become government hospital. And KEM is government hospital. They will also become KEM hospital.
2. Government must cap the fees of the private hospitals. Once government does that, the private hospitals will simply shut shop. The patients there will have to go to government hospital to die. They are also paying the taxes that run the government hospital. With no taxes, the government hospital will also die.
3. Government must allow everybody to go to private hospitals and reimburse the costs. But government doesn’t have that kind of money, so it will promise to reimburse, but it will ration the reimbursement. Rationing will be done by the bureaucrats/politicians. They will have Secretary quota, MP quota, etc. So their family members, relatives, hangers on, and bribe givers will enjoy the private hospital treatment and government, means you the honest taxpayers, will bear the cost. With government paying, private hospitals will simply jack up the cost. In fact they will make arrangements with babus to get paid for the patients who were never there on the beds which existed only on paper in the hospital which also existed on paper.

There is only one way you can be in that five star hospital, my fellow countrymen: earn enough to pay for it. Or just shut up and get lost. Do not destroy everything by demanding which you can not buy because you did not earn for it because you do not allow the factory to run where you can earn enough because there also you want to get paid without working.

Similar is the story of schools. People do not want to send their children to government schools because they also present the same school scene as KEM presents the hospital scene. But after admitting their children to private schools, they immediately turn to government and demand that it should regulate them. Little realising that if government were any good in regulating things, it could have regulated the government schools themselves, making them better than the private schools. But government loves regulations, so government immediately jumps in, starts regulating the private schools. So private schools also degenerate, and that is why education in India has become the biggest and cruelest and costliest joke ever told in the history of Homo Sapiens.

“Exploitation” is the most exploited word of English language. Exploited by the Leftist thugs.

There is only one kind of “work” that can be called exploitation: bonded labour. Labour where man is forced to work against his will, and is paid whatever the one forcing him to work is ready to pay. Forcing requires violence, and if violence is present in the transaction, it is not market, it is not trade, it is not employer-employee relationship, it is a criminal enterprise, a mafia operation.

Excluding above, there is no exploitation in the world. One man offers a work, declares the wage, and pays the wage he declared after the piece of the work is complete, or after the hours of work are complete (as agreed in the beginning as to what will constitute as the completion of the transaction), then it is a clean, honest trade; not exploitation.

As for the wage itself, nobody in the world knows what is a just wage. NOBODY. It is a psychological phenomenon, and like all things psychological, defies quantification. In general, employer is always in search of those who can do the work for less than what he is paying now, and employees are always complaining that they deserve more. Even Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, may well be unsatisfied with his package, for all I know.

So, the bad news: Bad news is that our wage can be only that below which nobody else is ready to do the same work. You should read it twice: our wage can be only that below which nobody else is ready to do the same work.

So what does then the fraud called “minimum wage” mandated by government mean? Answer: same as bonded labour. Government is violence. It has guns, it has handcuffs, it has jail. So it can mandate anything it likes. But it can not mandate Economics to disappear. Nor arithmetic can be made to disappear by using guns. So what happens when a government announces minimum wages is that all the businesses whose products fail to sell in the market if the enhanced wage component is added to their cost, such businesses are simply shut down. Labour is just a means to an end, not an end in itself (that is why MNREGA is the biggest fraud ever conceived by man). The end is a product that is sold in the market. The producer, unlike government, has no guns. He has customers. If they are not ready or able to pay the new price, the producer goes out of business, with the unsold stock as the loss. And, many new businesses, whose products are unlikely to sell with the enhanced cost component of the mandated wages, are never started. So, unemployment ensues. That is, government violence has exactly the same effect as the gangster violence: it destroys the economy and creates unemployment.

So, if you feel you are being exploited, do anything, but do not seek the help of the Leftist. He will get his scotch and his Pushpa, and you will lose your job.

If you feel you are being exploited, you either try to look for a better paying job, try to get new skills, try to start a new business yourself, start with hawking if nothing else. Or take the train back to village. If all land there was sold by you or your father, use savings to buy some land. Buy buffaloes also. They will give you milk. Grow your food, grow your own cotton. Weave your own cloth. Construct your own home. Mud house or a straw hut, if you can not afford bricks. And lo, voila, nobody is exploiting you.

Tough? May be, but true. Nature did not make you born with the Right to a job with the wages you like. There are no “Rights” in nature. Rights are just our construct, products of our imagination. Some charlatan, some thug, some liar may come and tell you that government has a duty to give you job. But the ghost called government is again only our imagination. In reality, it is just another bunch of human beings given jobs by us for the tasks assigned to them at the wages we announced to them and which we pay. They have no jobs lying in their cupboards to which you have right. And they can not create the jobs. Even their jobs were created by us when we decided to constitute a government for ourselves. You may vote out any number of governments you want, they may even start frauds like MNREGA, but they can not give you job, they can only end up bankrupting themselves if they try to give you job, as MNREGA is bankrupting Indian government.

Your only choice is to chase away the Leftist from your country, force the government to completely free the economy, and slowly, your wages will start rising. More and more businesses will open, they will compete to hire you, and they will raise the wages on offer in the competition.

Not acceptable to you? Your choice, your freedom. I have no guns to force to do what I am suggesting. But then be ready to live in poverty, unemployment, and progressive decline. The wheel of Economics will continue to turn mercilessly, heartlessly. Economics is not afraid of your ally the Leftist thug and his guns. Economics did not fear even the nukes of Stalin. Stalin disappeared, not Economics. You can either ride the wheel of Economics and become ever richer, or get crushed by it.

The primitive societies could not visualise that anything can be work other than hunting and gathering. Both involve muscle. Though actually both involved mind more than muscle. If only muscles were needed for even hunting and gathering, Homo Sapiens stood just no chance. Even the monkeys would thrash us anyday.

But the primitive mind could only see moving limbs, it could not even know that what was guiding and seeing the limbs move was mind. So it engraved on its genes that the work meant only the moving limbs.

This genetic encoding has resulted into untold misery and millions upon millions of deaths. We still are not able to visualise the work as anything other than limbs moving. But only limbs moving gave us only kills and fruits both obtained with great struggle against the competitors. Even the cooking of the kill was the doing of the mind. And then growing of the fruits we liked, many of which later became “crops,” was purely the plan of the mind.

So everything up from the kills after great chases and the wild fruits is doing of the mind, not of limbs, not of labour. Mind makes steel, not limbs, and mind assembles that steel into a car, not limbs. Everything up from the kills and wild fruits is the division of labour, and the division of the labour is purely a doing of the mind. Human mind. And only mind can do valuation of the doings of the mind. No muscles can evaluate the output of a mind. And the division of labour and capacity to assign values to the products of this division is what we call modern industrial society. In fact Civilisation was always this only: division of labour and valuation of the resultant products. Industrial age is just the addition of machines to it, machines, again a creation of mind.

But the genetic encoding continues. We idolise limbs, and we curse the mind as the exploiter. We idolise workers, and we demonise as exploiters the minds who organise activities that engage those workers. Without those minds, the workers will not remain “unexploited,” they will in fact not remain even workers. They will have to become hunter gatherers again.

So on this “Labour Day,” disinfect your mind. Disinfect your language. And teach the workers that “work” isn’t movement of limbs. Work is the mind in use, not only moving the limbs, but also creating the opportunities which make it possible for the limbs to move at the levers of a machine, at the buttons of a cockpit, at the keyboard of a computer, most of these now air conditioned, instead of the limbs moving in chase of a hard-to-get deer.

If you could cure human mind of this cancer that makes “worker” not only a separate entity of limbs and no mind, but a separate species that is supposed to rule Homo Sapiens, no questions asked, you would have actually served the Labour. If you could exorcise the ghost called “Leftist” from the minds of the “workers,” you would truly liberate mankind from all exploitations.

1990. India was bankrupt. Bajaj scooter had five year wait, telephone had ten year wait, Delhi Mumbai airfare was Rs. 5000 and you needed to know a Jt Secy to get a seat. Entry level salary of Class A officer was Rs. 3500 pm. A desert cooler was a luxury. Maruti 800 was a car for upper class.

We had to pledge gold to avoid default, and as the men involved later recalled, they were shivering till the plane carrying our gold touched down in London, as had the plane crashed in sea, we had no more gold to pledge.

Enter P V Narasimha Rao. We don’t know whether he was aware of the power of free market, or his hand was forced by IMF, as commies love to say. But Indian economy was partially liberalised, and our lives got transformed.

At 30 crore in 1947, we used to starve, at 130 crore we export grain. Entry level salary of a class D staff is Rs. 20000 pm. You can just walk in and walk out with a scooter/phone. Nobody buys Maruti 800. Company discontinued the model. They go for higher models. Maruti 800 has become too pedestrian. Most urban homes have AC.

And Delhi Mumbai airfare is still Rs. 5000. Anytime you walk into the airport, you will have a flight.

Another crisis is upon us thirty years later. Can Modi use it to set the economy totally free and complete the liberalisation?

Let us see. After all, his own party worships Red if it is wrapped in saffron. And the section that most benefitted from Liberalisation, salary wise and perks wise, the government employees, is dead against it. That is the power of economic illiteracy, reinforced daily by the Leftist thugs in schools, colleges, media, popular culture, and politics.

After all, only the fools, or blinds, or evil minds, can not see the magical difference in our lives post 1990.

Consider the following:

Before Corona epidemic
1. 26000 persons were dying in India per day
2. 1600 persons were dying in Italy per day.
3. 7000 persons were dying in the US per day.

Now compare that with Covid deaths, in say, the US. Total 37000 dead in about 45 days. That is, an increase of 822 per day, that is around 10% of the normal, and the US is shaken. Or take Italy. 22000 deaths in 45 days. That is, an increase of about 500 deaths per day, an increase of 30% over the normal, and Italy is ravaged.

And now consider that 10 crore persons died in Spanish Flu of 1918, 2 crores of them in India.

Two things have led to shut down of the countries: We had grown confident that with better medical facilities, pandemics are a thing of the past. Second, now we have TV cameras. Churchill could happily puff at his cigar even as bodies were lying in piles in the markets of Bengal in the famine of 1940s. Nowadays, the dead body of a single child shook the entire world and led to chain of events consequences of which will be for decades with us.

The difference between natural deaths per day in a country and Corona deaths is that, natural deaths occur all over the country, most people die in their homes, and most die in old age. Society knows that births and deaths are part of life. As against this, in a pandemic like Corona, people of all age groups die, they mostly die in hospitals, and die concentrated in few cities, leading to choking of hospitals and crematoriums. Bodies even in a developed country like the US are being transported in trucks loaded like goods, and are being buried in mass graves. With TV cameras, no politician can survive if not seen acting against the pandemic.

As for businesses, they won’t survive even if lockdown is not imposed. Corona will explode, will take away key workers, will terrorise others, and people will simply stop buying.

We do not realise that money is just our imagination, and all business is our trust in the future. We buy today because we hope to earn tomorrow also. We invest today because we hope to sell tomorrow. Take away the trust, and businesses collapse in a heap, which people call depression. The imagination that is money simply evaporates.

What to do? Just cooperate with the leaders. They are facing something in which they are truly helpless, though they won’t admit it.

As for businesses, they will survive exactly as before, as if reopening after a Sunday, if they continue to pay salaries during the lockdown, even if they need to borrow. That applies to individuals also. They must continue to pay bills, salaries of maids and drives, rents, and EMIs. And that applies to governments also. They must also not stop salaries. Even if they need to borrow. Like Corona, economy is also just a chain. Even as we are trying to break the Corona chain, we have to make sure that the chain called economy, the लेन देन, buying and selling, must not stop.

Otherwise we will take years to recover from the economic depression, and we will all suffer equally: the employers and the employed.

Why exactly can’t we even see the obvious dancing before our eyes? How did we become so shallow and superficial, living mediocre lives?

The Dumbs of Hindostan have discovered that Europeans are spending such and such percentage of their GDP on health services, and we are not; how cruel of us.

So my dear Dumbs of Hindostan, we do not spend much on our health services simply because we have nothing to spend on health services after we have spent on our bare daily needs.

Just one example. Germany has been claimed to be spending over 12% of its GDP on health services. Indian figure is cited around 1.5%.

German GDP per capita is USD 48000. Take away 12%, and the German guy is still left with USD 42240 to spend on himself. Indian GDP is USD 2900. Take away 1.5% and the Indian is left with USD 2856. And even if you take away 12%, you will still have only USD 348 per capita to spend on health care, as against USD 5760 per capita in case of Germany. And if you tax Indians so high, they will clobber you, because they will starve before they ever reach the fancy Germany-like hospitals you dream of constructing.

We do not have Europe like schools, hospitals, roads, public transport, roads, and municipal services simply because we do not earn like Europeans. We do not earn like Europeans because we do not work like Europeans. We want unearned. And we vote for charlatans and liars who lie to us that they can give us European cities without us having to work like Europeans.

States are demanding fantastic amounts from the Centre to tide over the revenue loss caused by the lockdown.

Suppose they lose two months’ revenue (March April). That would be one twelfth, 8.3% for each year. Can’t they bear this downtick in revenue?

Actually they can’t. All state governments are bankrupt. Each year they borrow to the limit set for them by the Central government. (Yes, India is solvent only because the states can’t borrow beyond a pre set limit. Otherwise the vote bank managers would borrow entire House of Morgan, will buy whole blocks in New York, and run away as India would collapse. Centre has no such limit. But it has IMF, World Bank, and other rating agencies which immediately raise red flag when borrowings go out of hand. We were saved from bankruptcy ten years ago only by the international rating agencies.)

Coming back to economy. Relax, sit back and relish Ramayana and Mahabharata. They are still captivating, mesmerising.

Entire agriculture is alive and kicking. No effect of lockdown. Farm implements and fertiliser suppliers are doing business as usual. Goods traffic of Indian Railways is running. Passenger services cause only the loss, so IR is actually saving money. Power industry and mines are open. So are most heavy industry plants. Software engineers are of course can and are working from home. So Are many other professionals.

As individuals, I hope we have not become Americans in India. I mean, I hope we have savings to tide over the three months if incomes go to zero, which in many cases won’t be the case. As for construction industry, labour would have left for the villages by the first week of April for harvest in any case. Nobody could have stopped them.

States see this as the opportunity to extort money from the Centre so that loot actually increases post-Corona. That is, like every natural calamity, they want to make sure that Corona is also just another loot festival.

They would not have been bankrupt, of course, if only they had allowed citizens to do business and trade and production. But then, who would bribe them? How would the junior study in America then?