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	Sky-high bills leave Nigerian mothers and newborns trapped in hospitals by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani Thomson Reuters Foundation Umuahia, Nigeria   Nigerian mothers are stuck for months in maternity wards, forbidden from leaving until their debts are settled, writes Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani.   Four months after giving birth in Umuahia, the capital of Nigeria''s southeastern Abia state, 23-year-old single mother Amarachi Amadi is still in hospital with her baby girl.   While the mother and her daughter are in good health, they are not allowed to leave the public hospital until Amadi settles the 543,000 naira ($1,900) bill for their care.   Amadi, who makes a living selling stones to construction workers for 40 naira ($0.15) per sack, fears she may never be able to clear her debt - leaving her and her baby trapped in the Umuahia Federal Medical Centre (FMC) for the foreseeable future.   "I have really suffered.. and they do not allow me to go out," said Amadi, who relies on her mother to bring food into the hospital and to help her care for her baby, Oluebubechi.   New mothers like Amadi are stuck in maternity wards across Nigeria - forbidden from leaving until their debts are settled.   Known as Awaiting Bill Settlement (ABS) patients, these women are responsible for looking after and feeding themselves and their newborns.   Few Nigerians have health insurance, leaving many patients clinging to the hope their bills will be waived by hospital directors or covered by visiting well-wishers.   Meanwhile, whenever the maternity ward at the hospital is full, many ABS patients are forced to sleep on the floor.   "Sometimes, we place all the babies on one bed while the mothers sleep in chairs," said one nurse, who asked not to be named as she was not authorised by the hospital to speak.   "Some babies have stayed here until they started crawling," the nurse said, adding that some mothers had managed to escape the hospital with their babies when no one was watching.   Like Amadi, nine other nursing mothers in the FMC''s maternity ward are stuck in limbo, having been discharged by the doctors but trapped within the hospital grounds by their debts.   Janet Moses, 19, said the father of her twin boys had stopped visiting or answering her calls over the past month. She believes he has been scared off by the bill.   No one visits Moses or brings her food, so she depends on other patients to share their meals with her. Other patients on the ward are slightly more fortunate.   Adaku Mmaduabuchi, a 25-year-old housewife who gave birth to her first child in May, is brought meals daily by her husband. But they too have been struggling to pay off their debt.   "I have been phoning my friends and relatives to see if anyone can lend me the money," said her husband, Ihunze, who has so far only paid a third of the 200,000 naira ($700) they owe.   There are a large number of ABS patients at the FMC due to the hospital''s policy of treating every patient who arrives, regardless of whether they can afford to pay upfront for their treatment, said Chuku Abali, the director of the hospital.   Abali said he frequently waives the bills of the hospital''s patients, many of whom are nursing mothers, with amounts ranging from 10,000 naira ($35) to 1.5 million naira ($5,300).   "But if we continue to run on charity, we will fold. Things have to be paid for," Abali told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.   Many patients wait in the hope that philanthropists, who sometimes visit during Easter and Christmas holidays, will clear their debts when they next visit, the hospital director said.   "We also conduct investigations to find out if patients have any relatives who can afford to pay, then we write to them."   Other hospitals, like the University College Hospital (UCH) in the southwestern city of Ibadan, are taking a more novel approach when it comes to dealing with their ABS patients.   The UCH has set up a fund which allows hospital staff to make voluntary monthly contributions from their salaries towards patients'' bills. Abandoned teenage mothers are given priority.   Yet these contributions alone are not enough to solve the problem, said Adefemi Afolabi, the UCH''s deputy director.   "There is no day I get to my table without seeing letters from people applying for cancellation of bills," Afolabi said.   The health ministry announced plans earlier this year to build 10,000 health clinics across the country, which could provide maternity care at a lower cost, according to Afolabi.   "The government also needs to extend the National Health Insurance Scheme so it goes to the grassroots," he said. "Only government workers and some private workers are entitled to it."   The Nigerian health ministry was not available for comment.   Back at the FMC''s maternity ward, the mothers talk about the day when they will finally be free to go home with their babies.   But 25-year-old Blessing Godfrey has no such hope. The student was rushed to the hospital after she fell unconscious when her baby was born unexpectedly.   Godfrey woke up on the ward to learn that her baby had died. Two weeks later, the grieving mother is still in hospital, discharged but unable to settle her 19,000 naira ($67) bill.   Her mother, a widow, makes very little selling vegetables, while her boyfriend, also a student, denies he is the father. "There is no one to assist me," Godfrey said.   http://www.everywomaneverychild.org/news-events/news/1254-uhc-day-toolkit http://universalhealthcoverageday.org/ http://www.hhrguide.org/ http://fxb.harvard.edu/research/social-justice-and-the-right-to-health/ http://bit.ly/23VTUic http://theelders.org/universal-health-coverage http://theelders.org/news-media/universal-health-coverage Visit the related web page
	Google is coming after critics in Academia and Journalism by Zephyr Teachout Washington Post USA   About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this prescient comment: “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.”   Wu was right. And now, Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.   This summer, a small team of well-respected researchers and journalists, the Open Markets team at the New America think tank (where I have been a fellow since 2014), dared to speak up about Google, in the mildest way. When the European Union fined Google for preferring its own subsidiary companies to its rival companies in search results, it was natural that Open Markets, a group dedicated to studying and exposing distortions in markets, including monopoly power, would comment. The researchers put out a 150-word statement praising the E.U.’s actions.   They wrote, “By requiring that Google give equal treatment to rival services instead of privileging its own, [the E.U.] is protecting the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend.” They called upon the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice and state attorneys general to apply the traditional American monopoly law, which would require separate ownership of products and services and the networks that sell products and services.   Google has been funding New America for years at high levels. Within 24 hours of the statement going live, Google representatives called New America’s leadership expressing their displeasure. Two planned hires for the Open Markets team suddenly were canceled. Three days later, the head of the Open Markets team, the accomplished journalist Barry C. Lynn, received a letter from the head of the think tank, demanding that the entire team leave New America.   The reason? The statement praising the E.U.’s decision against Google was, according to New America President Anne-Marie Slaughter, “imperiling the institution.” (As of this writing, Slaughter has denounced the story as false, claiming that Lynn was dismissed for failures of “openness” and “collegiality.”)   When Google was founded in 1998, it famously committed itself to the motto: “Don’t be evil.” It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent. As Lord Acton famously said, “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.” Those with too much power cannot help but be evil. Google, the company dedicated to free expression, has chosen to silence opposition, apparently without any sense of irony.   Google did not always operate this way in relation to think tanks, even those it funded. The head of Google’s parent company, Eric Schmidt, served on the board of New America starting 2000 and was chairman from 2008 through May 2016. The Open Markets institute has long studied excessive corporate power and argued for the importance of antimonopoly laws. They were not previously punished for their work.   But in recent years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities, video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Google has recruited and cultivated law professors who support its views. And as the New York Times recently reported, it has become invested in building curriculum for our public schools, and has created political strategy to get schools to adopt its products.   This year, Google is on track to spend more money than any company in America on lobbying. In 2015, it was the third biggest corporate spender, paying more than Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin or the Koch brothers on lobbying. Much of what it is spending its money on has nothing to do with technical details regarding its search engine and everything to do with using its power in its search engine to shut out some competitors and build power over others.   It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.   The imperial overreach of Google in trying to shut down a group of five researchers proves the point that the initial release from Open Markets was trying to make: When companies get too much power, they become a threat to democratic free speech and to the liberty of citizens at large.   In 1948, in the Supreme Court case U.S. v. Columbia Steel Co., Justice William O. Douglas explained that the traditional philosophy of American antitrust law is that “all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy … should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men.”   Google is forming into a government of itself, and it seems incapable of even seeing its own overreach. We, as citizens, must respond in two ways. First, support the brave researchers and journalists who stand up to overreaching power; and second, support traditional antimonopoly laws that will allow us to have great, innovative companies — but not allow them to govern us.   Google’s actions forced the Open Markets team to leave New America. But, thankfully, it did not succeed in silencing them entirely. Open Markets will continue on as a separate organization, which I will chair. Their work exposing corporate monopolies and advocating for regulation is more important than ever. Google shows us why.
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