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Bribing in the health sector
The minute after she had given birth to her first child at one of the public hospitals in the city of Bangalore in India, Nesam Velankanni wanted the midwife to put the crying baby on her chest. However, before even getting a glimpse of her newborn baby, a nurse whisked the infant away and an attendant asked for a bribe. Nasam Velankanni was told that the customary price if she wanted to hold her child directly after giving birth was US$12 for a boy and US$7 if it was a girl. The attendant told her that she wanted the money immediately because the doctors were leaving for the day and wanted their share before going home. For Nasam Velankanni and her family, US$12 was a substantial amount of money since her husband was working for less than US$1 a day. Eventually, the poor woman's mother-in-law solved the problem by promising to pawn a set of gold earrings and thus Nasam Velankanni got to hold her newborn baby. Even if the Government of India has established fierce measures to combat such forms of petty corruption and extortion in the health sector, the custom remains partly because many poor people are afraid that their babies will receive bad treatment from angry health-care workers if they do not pay (Dugger, 2005).
This story, told in The New York Times on 30 August 2005, is but one of innumerable descriptions of corruption and similar forms of dysfunctional government practices that exist in many countries in the health-care sector. Survey data about perceptions of corruption from 23 developing countries shows that corruption in the health-care sector is ranked as number one among nine sectors in three countries,1 as number two in three other countries2 and within the top four most corrupt sectors in another four countries.3 In many of these countries, over 80% of the population has experienced corrupt practices in the health sector. Another survey study from former communist countries in Eastern Europe has shown that in most of these countries, well over 50% of the population thinks that corruption among doctors is widespread (Lewis, 2006). In Hungary, the practice is to leave an envelope at the...