CGHS even passed bills for a dead employee

The case came to light when the then Additional Director of CGHS in Delhi, T.K. Banerjee, investigated into the sky-rocketing bills coming from Hyderabad. According to his report, copies of which are available with The Indian Express, hospitals made it a point to give strong and costly drugs to government employees. Injections costing a whopping Rs 18,000 were pushed into a patient when there was no need for them, 400 units of Human Mixtured Insulin were given to another in a day, which is unheard of in medical circles.

Any Central Government officials referred to these hospitals were treated like a golden goose. Instead of one operation, which in the first instance may not be necessary, four were performed and bills put up and claimed. When a simple tablet could cure a headache, government employees were subject to multiple scans, sometimes four times in a day!

The report says that the CGHS dispensary loves to push patients to private hospitals at the drop of a hat. Minor ailments that can be treated at the CGHS itself are referred to a corporate hospital. The Banerjee report says: ‘‘Doctors in the dispensary (CGHS) are referring patients to super-speciality hospitals for minor ailments like depressive psychosis, diabetes and hypertension.’’

The report adds that there is ‘‘rampant corruption’’ when it comes to preparing the bills and the local authorities pass them without raising an eyebrow. A CGHS worker admitted that the inflated bills were prepared taking into account the bribes to be paid to the billing authorities and all top officials involved in the scam.

Banerjee says in his report that he fails to understand how a doctor at the CGHS, Hyderabad, could pass such absurd bills. The local CGHS authorities tried to reason saying they had no control over what private doctors do. The doctors, in turn, said they have never performed multiple operations on a patient in a day. They implied that it was the hospital management and the CGHS employees who distort bills.

The Banerjee report says costly medical tests like MRI, CT scan, ultra sound, doppler study and different types of angiography were done on the same patient without any justification. The report adds: ‘‘Who knows, the bill may have been prepared without giving the medicine.’’

Surprisingly, all the bills were passed by a doctor at CGHS and the Banerjee report says such sweeping financial powers involving crores should not be given to an individual. Instead, a committee comprising specialists in (general) medicine, radiology, surgery and pathology should be constituted to pass the bills.

Despite the report giving clinching evidence, the Deputy Director (admn) in Delhi claimed it was ‘‘too sketchy and does not cover all the issues’’. And Banerjee was promoted and transferred to Kolkata.