Shares of Mitra Keluarga Karyasehat Plunge after Death Baby
During the first trading session on Monday (11/09) shares of Mitra Keluarga Karyasehat, Indonesia's largest listed hospital operator in terms of market capitalization, plunged 4.27 percent to IDR 2,020 per share after a high degree of negative attention in Indonesian media. This weak performance is linked to a scandal that emerged over the weekend.
Although coming into the spotlight of Indonesian media over the weekend, the case actually occurred on Sunday 3 September 2017 when a 4-month-old baby girl, named Tiara Debora Simanjorang, died after being denied pediatric intensive care in the Mitra Keluarga Kalideres Hospital in West Jakarta. Treatment was denied because her parents could not meet the down payment requirements of the hospital.
In the early morning of Sunday 3 September 2017 (around 03:45 am local Jakarta time) the baby girl was rushed to the Mitra Keluarga Karyasehat hospital in West Jakarta after experiencing breathing difficulties. However, instead of providing the necessary treatment, the hospital told the family to take the baby to a hospital that receives patients under the government's universal healthcare program (a program that is covered by the Social Security Agency for Health, or in Indonesian: BPJS Kesehatan) because the parents could not come up with the required down payment of IDR 19.8 million (approx. USD $1,500).
The father could only offer IDR 5 million and promised to deliver the remainder of the down payments later on the day. However, this proposal was rejected by the hospital. Meanwhile, searching for a hospital that receives patients under the BPJS Kesehatan program - and has a pediatric intensive care unit - meant treatment was delayed for several hours.
Meanwhile, Mitra Keluarga Karyasehat denies the allegations and emphasizes it did continue treatment of the girl in the general emergency unit while also assisting the family to search for another hospital. By around 09:00 am they finally found another hospital that was willing to accept a BPJS patient, but by that time the condition of the baby girl had already deteriorated drastically, resulting in her death soon afterwards.
Under the universal healthcare program (in Indonesian: Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional, or JKN), a program that was launched in 2014 and is managed by BPJS Kesehatan, the Indonesian government targets to provide health insurance to all Indonesians by January 2019. However, the government does not force hospitals to support the program. As such, there are hospitals that simply refuse to receive patients under this program. A doctor, who works in a different hospital and did not want his name to be mentioned, said his hospital (which does receive patients under the JKN program) is very unhappy about the late payments of the government to the hospital for the JKN patients treated.
Jakarta Police announced it will conduct an investigation into the death of the baby girl, while both the Jakarta administration's health department and Indonesia's Health Ministry announced they will also conduct their own investigations into the case.
Stock Quote Mitra Keluarga Karyasehat - MIKA: