Medical assassins at the door: The sad fate of Erelu Mena Joseph Edgar

She looked intently at my face, weak from the trauma of her illness and plugged in to all sorts of gadgets and said to me: “Duke take me away from this place, these people don’t seem to know exactly what they are doing”… A few hours after she passed.

She was my wife. Erelu Mena Joseph Edgar. She passed at a young age of 51, one of the many victims of the inefficient structure that is the private health care delivery system of our country. 

In the last 12 months and at the onset of the second wave of the pandemic, the soft belly of that structure has been upended. Nigerians have seen the hollowness that is the embodiment of the system. Some Nigerians, taking advantage of the huge gap in basic health care delivery have gone ahead to take advantage of the situation to exploit the weakness of the whole system.

Today, Nigerians are the worse for it. Torn between the legendary lethargy of the public Health care System and the avarice that is private we see our people losing their lives and loved ones needlessly. With a below world standard life expectancy, this situation doesn’t help matters in any way.

In the last six months, we have witnessed a seeming conveyor belt of very prominent Nigerians lose their lives as they run to the private sector for help. They are charged humongous sums, figures that can build whole primary health care facilities in some suburban enclave being charged a single individual and yet that individual will still lose his life. This is now looking like the norm and not the exception.

Practitioners will run and go and hide under the tough operating environment. They will say, cost of medical equipment, cost of human capital, government structures, power etc. but how this pans out to for example charging a whopping N48m for just one patient for this same COVID is what I am waiting to see.

I am an investment banker and do not like flying blind. I need to see the figures, the facts behind the figures like we say on the Stock Exchange to see if there could be any justification to these situations otherwise, one would safely call the whole private sector health care delivery system in Nigeria a racket.

A racket that sabotages Government efforts at reforming the public sector so that traffic could be directed at them, but a racket that is also not ready and capable to handle the traffic either in terms of capacity or in the humanness that is needed in the profession but is driven by greed and “shortesim”.

Who are the losers? Nigerians. I have heard all sorts of arguments in their support and it all boils down to – the whole country is messed up and we are only trying to survive. 

Please charging N10m admission fee for any illness in this world much less of COVID is theft for want of nothing else to say. Losing your life in the process and being asked to pay another N6m to get your body released is wickedness and getting discharged after paying N10m for COVID treatment and being asked to pay a release sum of N18m to be discharged is daylight robbery akin to medical banditry

I hereby call on relevant authorities to beam the search light on our Private Hospitals either through a public enquiry in a bid to look at the system and jump starting a reform that would be better off for all and sundry including the operatives if they are willing to repent.