Fw: BlindNews: Charity, insurance ease healthcare woes for poor

----- Original Message ----- From: "Leon Gilbert" <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Blind News Mailing List" <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 5:23 PM Subject: BlindNews: Charity, insurance ease healthcare woes for poor


Viet Nam News Agency, Vietnam Monday, February 27, 2006

Charity, insurance ease healthcare woes for poor

By Hong Van

HCM CITY - Nguyen Thi Chin and her son's family stayed awake all night after undergoing their cataract surgeries, afraid that if they fell asleep the world would be black again when they woke up.

"We thought we would lose our sight again," said Chin, who had been blind for almost 20 years before the 1998 operation restored her sight and that of all four members of her son's family.

Their fates changed when a local government official from Pho Khanh Commune in the central region's Quang Ngai Province approached the family and told them that eye doctors from HCM City could give them their sight back free of charge.

Chin and as many as 200,000 other people around the country have 3 million generous Vietnamese and foreign donors along with the HCM City Sponsoring Association for Poor Patients (HSAPP) to thank for the happy endings to their stories.

Nguyen Trong Xuat, HSAPP vice chairman, said that his organisation had started in 1994 as a small operation to help pay the hospital fees of poor HCM City patients and had since blossomed into a reputable agency handling the neediest cases nationwide.

For the past 12 years, HSAPP has collected almost VND300 billion (US$18.7 million) to help more than 1 million poor patients and 60,000 destitute children through its seven major programmes: cleft palate operations, cataract surgery, hearing aids, wheelchairs for the disabled, free meals, school scholarships, and free health insurance.

The cataract surgery programme has managed to take care of all of the cataract cases in HCM City and 34 other provinces.

HSAPP is just one of many of the city health care sector's efforts to make health care accessible to the poor residents of the city and southern provinces.

Financial aid

Four-year old Truong Van Hiep from Tien Giang Province was born with several heart defects. Last July, he was admitted to the city's Cho Ray Hospital - one of the top hospitals in southern Viet Nam.

Hiep's mother, Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa, said in tears: "When he was seven months old, the doctors discovered he had heart problems and said the operation would cost $2,000."

Hiep's parents' meagre income from their small paddy field couldn't cover the operation. Then last year a neighbour told them that they could seek financial aid at Cho Ray Hospital. "When the hospital told me that the cost would be waived, we were so happy," Hoa said.

Nguyen Van Khoi, deputy director of Cho Ray Hospital, said that his hospital's board was committed to providing the best treatment and care possible to patients, independent of their financial status.

Every ward at Cho Ray has an assessment team which, after receiving an application for a fee reduction or waiver from a patient, will verify his or her economic situation with local authorities.

After reviewing each case, the ward's director makes a recommendation to the hospital's board of directors.

As a result, over the past ten years, Cho Ray Hospital has waived or reduced hospital fees for almost 139,000 poor patients at a cost of more than VND120 billion ($7.5 million). That number accounts for about 20 per cent of the total number of patients admitted to the hospital.

Realising that many patients cannot afford the best treatment due to lack of funds, Khoi said that his hospital had started an instalment plan for intensive care patients a decade ago. Since then it has expanded the payment scheme to all of its other wards.

The list of patients putting off their debt keeps getting longer and longer. The highest amount owed is VND40 million ($2,500), with one patient saying he would pay off his bill in 2012.

"We let the patient decide his or her own instalment schedule," Khoi said. "Other hospitals said it was risky, but we believe that patients will try their best to pay us back for saving their lives while they were in financial difficulty."

Tran Van Tien, director of the Health Ministry's Health Strategy and Policy Institute, said that developing a health care system to meet the needs of Viet Nam's 83 million people, 21 per cent of whom are poor, has always been one of the Government's top priorities.

Public and private

In 1989 the State piloted a social health insurance (SHI) system that mixes public and private providers in order to improve access to health care services for those unable to pay standard medical fees.

"Social health insurance implementation has been the most important aspect of our financial reforms in the health care industry," Tien said.

At the end of 2005, almost 20 million poor people were covered by SHI, he said.

According to the latest SHI reform, which came into effect last July, any family earning less then 260,000VND a month in urban areas and 200,000VND in rural areas is eligible for SHI membership.

Health insurance expenditures for the poor went up from VND50,000 ($3.14) per card to VND60,000, bringing the total amount covered by the Health Care Fund for the Poor to VND1.450 trillion ($90.6 million).

HCM City Health Department director Nguyen The Dung said that the municipal People's Committee had already bought health insurance cards for 250,600 poor households.

Dung added that the health care burden on the urban poor could only be eased by the charity of strangers.

HSAPP Vice Chairman Nguyen Trong Xuat said that while they formerly had to seek financial support from potential donors and companies, nowadays donors found their way to his office with money and equipment. "When it comes to something like this, people usually have a big heart," he said. "Running a charity effectively is really a matter of proving that donations are really getting to those in need, and of making the accounting transparent." - VNS


http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=01HEA270206


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