What Patients Hope To Hear From The Finance Minister

High on the aam aadmi’s Budget hopes is some govt help to meet treatment costs

- PT Jyothi Datta

Latha* sits with a far away look in her eyes. Her face, partly swollen from cancer and surgery, is lined on the other side by a slim tube taped to her skin.

“The 10th (of February) will make it one month of my surgery,” she says in silent anger, sitting on a make-shift cloth bed on a pavement near a Mumbai hospital. Hailing from Bihar, Latha had come to the city with her husband to get treatment for cancer in her mouth. They have spent ₹80,000 on surgery and now the chemotherapy and radiation would begin, says the 30year-old, unaware of the schedule but worried about the treatment bills they still have to pay.

When told that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman would be coming out with the Budget, a Government exercise that would allocate funds towards healthcare for all citizens, Latha responds with a bleak gaze and silence.

It does not take much to figure out where financial resources are desperately required in the country. For patients, on hospitals, and on health services.

Lanes alongside the hospital where Latha goes for treatment and neighboring ones, too, have patients living on pavements. Patients from different parts of the country gather around to recount their own health problems and why they travel so far for treatment.