Why the Prita Controversy is Good News: .... it wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago
The controversy raging over the Prita Mulyasari and Omni International Hospital, involving as it does so many important moral and legal questions for Indonesia, is a case that needed to happen. It’s just a pity that a 32-year old mother of two was jailed and swept up in it all.
Questions this case has provoked runs the gamut; freedom of speech, what constitutes legitimate complaint versus defamation, the exercise of undue or improper influence, incorrect or wilful misinterpretation of the law by police or prosecution authorities, contradictory or confusing statutes, patient’s rights, access to personal medical information, private versus public medicine, what constitutes malpractice and who defines it, malpractice suits against hospitals and doctors, insurance and the ever-increasing cost of medical treatment.
On the one hand you have countries like the US with the very best of hi-tech medicine available to those who can afford it, with far and away the world’s highest medical costs and yet overall offering its citizens only the 37th ‘best’ medical service in the world. And even that level of care threatens to bankrupt the nation and come crashing down.
Compare that to the scenario in many countries of the undeveloped or developing world, whose medical facilities are rudimentary even for their wealthy (they go to America, Europe or Australia for treatment), while every one else makes do with substandard and/or overstretched facilities or simply cannot afford doctors to begin with. Where far too often people die unnecessarily and the poor and terminally ill have no option but return to their families and villages to die. As often as not without any palliative or pain treatment, or home hospice care.
The picture is brightened a bit by top class international medical care now being offered at reasonable cost in some countries like India, Thailand, Singapore and perhaps Malaysia. Indonesia has pretensions to join this select bunch, proudly posting online that “Indonesia is poised to become an important centre for medical tourism due to its low cost of treatment, highly qualified doctors, and extremely modern hospitals.”
Well good luck with that guys. But if the treatment meted out to Prita Mulyasari by the Omni International Hospital is anything to go by and which exploded online throughout Indonesia and reported by all the worlds major newspapers and wire services.... I’d say there’s a way to go.
Be Quiet! or Else!
If you missed it, the facts of the case are these. In August of last year Prita Mulyasari was admitted to Omni Hospital in Tangerang just outside Jakarta, where she was initially diagnosed by her doctors with dengue but later told she had a virus and given an injection. Prita said she became numb and her condition worsened. Dissatisfied with her treatment she decided to switch hospitals. When she asked for her medical notes with the initial diagnosis, the hospital refused to give them to her, she said.
That’s when she sent e.mails to 10 friends detailing her experience as a patient at the Omni Hospital and the way her complaint was handled. These personal e.mails were widely circulated on internet mailing lists and soon found their way onto various blogs and the Facebook social networking site.
Alarmed, instead of attempting to defuse the situation, Omni management made the mistake of setting the full weight of the law on Prita. She was sued and found guilty in a civil case and has to pay a US$26,000 fine. Not content with that Prita was charged with criminal defamation, where she could face a jail term of 6 years and further heavy fines of up to US$100,000. Meantime, duly charged, Prita was thrown in jail where she languished for three weeks to await trial.
The Omni Hospital and their lawyers rejected all Ms Mulyasari’s allegations, claiming they were deliberately defamatory and they were forced to take legal action to defend their reputation, that the claims had caused the company substantial financial losses from patient boycotts and frozen business deals.
And they were surprised when all-viral-hell broke loose?
Hey, It’s just business.....
News spread online like wildfire spilling over into the Media, with a 100,000 signature petition causing eminent jurists and civil rights to say the laws had been misused and misinterpreted, which in turn caused the House of Representatives to call on Omni to apologise and the police to drop the case, which then had all three presidential candidates leaping on the bandwagon calling for fair treatment for Prita. As a result Prita was finally released from custody 3rd June but still faces criminal charges.
It seems the management and owners of Omni live in another age when the powerful ruled over the common people by decree and certainly before the power of the internet had impinged on their consciousness. For despite the uproar, the opprobrium and the ghastly publicity Omni director Bina Ratna told members of the House of Representatives, who had demanded Omni apologise to Prita, that the hospital would continue with the legal process.
Who are Omni? Who owns them? Is there any foreign ownership involved? They are obviously a private not a public enterprise. Even their lawyers refer to them as a ‘company’. In what I reckon is sloppy reporting I find no reference to ownership in any of the English language reports of the case. Holding owners accountable is an obvious step. You can’t do that if they remain invisible and use the law to cover-up mistakes and potential embarrassment. We should be told.
In any event, given the circumstances of this case I feel we can now safely assume there will be a happy ending for Prita and her family, despite a bloody awful past 10 months. Perhaps she will in turn be suing Omni? If so, and Omni lose, they’ve nobody to blame but themselves, if for no other reason than for being such benighted bullies.
Actually, it’s a good sign...
So I guess in a way, it’s all onward and upward. Neanderthal managements and those with an exaggerated sense of entitlement will have to adjust increasingly to a public opinion that cannot be cowed into submission, just as public officials will have to take note that competence, fairness and honesty will increasingly be the benchmark by which they are judged or found wanting. Of course that day has not fully dawned but it sort of feels we’re headed in that direction.
The mark of a successful society is the extent it invests in the education of all its members, according to their ability. The mark of any civilized state is when all its citizens enjoy equal opportunity under laws that are fair and equally applied, together with adequate provision of food, shelter, medical treatment and care for the aged, who are genuinely too poor to look after these things themselves. Nothing has shamed Republican America more than Reagan emptying the lunatic asylums onto the streets, his dismantling of what was once the best public health service in the world, the creation of a growing class of emigrant neo-indentured labour or George W. Bush administration’s legal sanction of torture. It is as if things really have to get a lot worse before things can get better. With Obama it finally seems that the US has at last set itself on the path to a much fairer, kinder society after a 30-year long aberration.
It’s already a decade or so since Suharto’s command society passed into history and the many young people with no experience of how things worked back then actually have serious expectations that their leaders can and should deliver on their promises for a fair and democratic society. While it may be that elections continue to be more about personalities than issues, hopefully that will change. The country has weathered the last decade indeed progressed pretty well and given the way it’s gone, Indonesia 2020 and its people look set for its place in the sun.
