GHANA WOMEN DETAINED AT HOSPITALS FOR NOT SETTLING THEIR BILLS BUT GOV’T SPENDS INSANELY – CHRIS-VINCENT AGYAPONG

A friend of mine who is not rich by any standard and currently visiting Ghana from the UK went to the Korle-Bu hospital and what he saw crippled him.

Women who had given birth are being kept there (literally being held prisoners of the hospital) because they cannot clear their delivery bills, he said. He paid 5,000 GHS for 6 women he does not know from anywhere—and they were soon discharged.

The joy on the faces of those women, he described as never seen.

He asked me this: so how come the gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening in Ghana—without any real government social interventions to cushion the poor?

A woman will be kept after childbirth in a government hospital because she cannot pay her delivery bills. And yet there is a National Health Insurance scheme said to be in place. Why does this not cover every aspect of child birth?

People are indeed suffering in Ghana and there doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel.

Imagine your mother giving birth to you and unable to foot her health bill, therefore you and your mother being held hostage or prisoners of the hospital in a 21st century Ghana—where government officials cruise around in expensive V8s and are u unexplainable rich.

This same country has found money to build a national cathedral but cannot provide this basic relief for women—the cornerstone of its very existence.

Think about this!

—Chris-Vincent Agyapong