Indonesia - Hospital in eastern Indonesia halts services for poor over outstanding bill claim

Surabaya, eastern Indonesia (The Jakarta Post/ANn)- Hundreds of poor people in Surabaya of eastern Indonesia have been denied free healthcare at a state hospital, which is mandated to serve the poor by law, because the local administration has not reimbursed the hospital for its expenditure on poor patients this year.

Dr. Soetomo General Hospital on Monday began limiting its free-healthcare services for poor people, with management saying that the municipal administration owed the hospital Rp 58.8 billion (US$6.6 million) in unpaid medical bills.

Management said that the state must repay the hospital for the free services it provided for members of poor families who had been allocated special poor status identification cards called SKTM.

SKTM family members may receive free healthcare at state hospitals if their local community health center (puskesmas) does not have the means to treat their illness.

"We still provide services for SKTM holder patients, but with limitations. They are exempted from paying for doctor's fees but are obliged to pay for medicine just like regular patients," Dr. Soetomo Hospital's director Dodo Anando said earlier this week.

He said that an average of 3,000 patients visited the hospital a day. Of those, some 30 percent, or between 800 and 1,000 patients, were from poor families. Of the poor patients, some 400 came from Surabaya, he said.

Dodo said that as a state-owned enterprise, the hospital found it difficult to manage its cash flow with an outstanding bill of Rp 58.8 billion. "We need income to purchase medicine and other needs."

The city administration has allocated Rp 62 billion from its amended 2011 budget for the free-health-services-for-poor program.

According to reports, the disbursement of the fund had stalled due to an ongoing dispute between the legislative council and the city administration.

The dispute reportedly centers on the alleged misappropriation of Rp 15.2 billion from the budget involving the procurement of cars for administration officials and police chiefs in the city.

While the council argues that the procurement violated prevailing regulations, the city administration insists it did not.

Chairman of the council's Commission D overseeing the issue, Baktiono, denied that the council was deliberately postponing the approval of the amended budget, saying that it had proposed two options that the administration could choose to pay the hospital bill.

However, he said, both options had been rejected by Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini, who had argued that neither option could be implemented. She insisted that approving the 2011 amended budget was the only way out to ensure the hospital bill was repaid.

Wahyoe Boediwardhana in Surabaya/The Jakarta Post | ANN

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