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Ras Adiba: So A Surgery Is Was Not

So it turns out to be a scam. A fortnight ago, the former TV newscaster, Ras Adiba Khalid, said she was paralysed from the waist down, needed urgent surgery in Australia that cost RM300,000 she did not have. After the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, visited her at the Pantai Medical Centre, donations rolled in at breakneck speed, about RM100,000 more than she needed. Off she went to Sydney, accompanied by relatives and a doctor from PMC. All she needed, it turns out, was some tests to check on her earlier surgery and physiotherapy, both readily available here. The only orthopaedic surgeon she consulted was from the PMC. Yet the PMC says it did not recommend, nor suggest, surgery, and retreats into doctor-patient confidentiality when pressed for answers.

Why then did the PMC's spine specialist, Dr Ernest Yeoh, accompany her to Sydney? Because her condition was life-threatening that she needed constant medical supervision or the money was there? Did he not advise her of options available here? Especially when public funds pay for her treatment? If not the PMC, who recommended she go to Sydney? Her doctor in Sydney? She herself? The PMC would have briefed the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and other VIPs, on her condition. And knew it was not surgery she needed. Why did they then not insist she be treated locally? The PMC says it did not recommend surgery nor that it would cost RM300,000. Who did? Ras Adiba? How did she know? When the PMC did not object, one must assume it did.

The PMC now says, when the heat is on, it "did not mind" when Ras Adiba wanted the surgeon who did corrective surgery on her two years ago, after her spinal cord was damaged in a car accident in 1997 whilst on duty for TV3, to attend to her. And allowed, in silence, the scam on the Malaysian public. She told the world from her bed in the PMC she is paralysed from the waist down, needs urgent corrective surgery to correct it, made made false statements the PMC did not correct, and fools of us all. Malaysian newspapers, several in UMNO's control, rain their editorial guns on this Ras Adiba scam. Institutions rushed in with more funds than she needed within days of the Prime Minister's call on her. Meanwhile, other more deserving Malaysians die because they cannot get public donations or the Prime Minister to visit them. And all Ras Adiba hopes for is to be well enough to ride her Harley Davidson motorcycle!

It is important all parties in this, including Dr Mahathir and Dato' Seri Abdullah Badawi, come clean. Ras Adiba must insist the PMC to tell the truth. She and the PMC cannot hold on to this doctor-patient confidentiality if what results from that is a scam. For this will impinge on future donations for more deserving medical cases.

Education and health are the two cornerstones of a caring society. The frequent heart-rending appeals for donations to cure seriously ill men, women and children shows us not as a caring society but of a society in which profit and money dominates. Malaysians today cannot afford medical treatment, or higher education, because they have been priced out of reach. The professions predicate their success with how wildly they overcharge. Many, especially the retired, cannot afford even routine medical attention. The government closes a blind eye to rapacious hospitals and doctors with its skewed policy of constantly raising the cost of medical care.

Malaysia's much vaunted primary health care is all but non-existent, the hospitals in Kuala Lumpur have been reorganised into profit centres, with the avenues for those who cannot afford it all but unavailable. Elaborate schemes are made to reorganise the hospitals so crony racketeers could make a killing out of the land. The reorganisation of the General Hospital in Kuala Lumpur is so the unused reserve land could make billions for some. Health and education now attracts the charlatan and the spiv. The cost of medical care have shot through the roof, the cost of medicines unacceptably high especially after all medical services were privatised.

Amidst this state of affairs is the Ras Adiba scam. In one sense, it reflects the inability of the Government to handle matters as it should. It was meant to raise the government's caring image. Instead it is revealed as one not beyond participating in a scam. The government's public relations stunts have all come croppers, this one only the latest in a series. None in government would comment on this political folly, but it must. It reflects once again that unless it gets its act together, and reveal the Ras Adiba caper for what it is, it would be subject to more anger from the Malay community than it bargained for. Even UMNO-controlled Malay newspapers strain at their leash. It is not believed as it once was. Helping Ras Adiba to obtain funds for a medical checkup, seen at first as a sign of its concern, is today seen as crass manipulaton to cheat the Malaysian public. The kudos it thought it could get by caring for Ras Adiba's plight turns out in the end to be as destructive of its well-meant charity as when it refused the VIP prisoner in Sungei Buloh his much-needed surgery. The longer the government holds its tongue the worse it is.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my