Hospitals to ask for medical cover for border stateless

By The Nation
Published on February 1, 2010

Border hospital representatives will ask Public Health Minister Jurin Laksanawisit today for national health security cover for an initial group of 500,000 stateless persons, setting up a fund to assist their medical needs as urgent policy.

Tak's Umphang Hospital director Dr Worawit Tantiwattanasap told a seminar yesterday at the Thai Journalists Association that although stateless people, most of whom were very poor, weren't entitled to any citizens rights, the hospital could not deny them medical treatment.

Worawit cited a 2009 report that out of the 640,000 population in Tak's five border districts, 300,000 had no health security. Of 690,000 outpatient cases and 190,000 inpatient cases, stateless persons accounted for 120,000 cases and 66,000 cases respectively.

The five border hospitals carried heavy burdens with a total social welfare budget of Bt115.6 million, he said. Umphang Hospital had seen patients without health security occupying 58 per cent of its beds and had been in the red by Bt20 million a year, he said.

Infectious malaria in the five border districts was the country's worst, while many suffered from typhoid, dengue haemorrhagic fever, cholera, and meningococcal meningitis. Tuberculosis (TB) was growing worse with 10 per cent of registered immigration workers there having drugresistant TB. To give TB medicine and Swine flu vaccine strictly to those with health security cards only was difficult in a sphere aimed at disease prevention. All people, with or without ID cards, could be infected and transmit diseases, he said.

National Health Committee secretarygeneral Dr Ampol Jindawattana said this issue was one of the Health Assembly's 14 articles acknowledged by the Cabinet to be pushed forward as public policy. He said the government should not find it difficult to allocate Bt2,000 per head - about Bt1 billion per year - in subsidies to hospitals to provide medical treatment for the 500,000 stateless persons.