Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi and Health Minister Marzieh Vahidi-Dastjerdi have been squabbling publicly over just what happened.
The hospital involved was the Firuzgar Public Hospital in Shahr-e Rey in South Tehran, not the Imam Khomeini Hospital in mid-town Tehran as reported by the Iran Times two weeks ago. (See Iran Times of April 29, page one.)
Dolatabadi was quoted in the media as saying, “Ten people have so far been arrested in this matter and they have all confessed that this act was carried out; they have attributed their actions to their superiors.”
However, he did not say anything about arresting any superiors, suggesting that he was not convinced by what the junior staffers said. On the other hand, he did not suggest why ambulance drivers and other lower level hospital staff would remove patients from their hospital beds on their own initiative.
Health Minister Dastjerdi, the only woman in the cabinet, was defensive about the reports, which have incensed the public.
She said that under the law no patient may be rejected by a hospital for inability to pay.
Newspaper reports describing what Dastjerdi said have been contradictory, with Dastjerdi later saying she has been misquoted by some of the media.
She initially was reported in several newspapers as saying no patient had been denied care. But she later insisted she had only said that the hospital management had not denied care for non-payment, seemingly assigning all blame to low-level employees.
She complained that she had been misquoted by people with an agenda of “distorting the exemplary service’s of the nation’s health care providers.”
The prosecutor dismissed that out of hand, saying no one had provided any evidence of such an anti-regime conspiracy.
The health minister said the hospital management had, in fact, filed a formal complaint against staffers for removing patients.
The prosecutor said he had indeed received a formal complaint. But he said that does not necessarily exempt the Health Ministry of responsibility for what happened.
Since the initial report that two men had been driven by an ambulance from the hospital and dumped beside a highway south of Tehran, news accounts report that a 70-year-old woman, Shokat Karimi, had also been abandoned when she was unable to pay.
The two men were reportedly dumped beside the road April 14. A truck driver noticed them lying beside the highway and summoned police. News reports said one man had burns to his head and face, while the other was laying beside crutches with an envelope containing his X-rays beside him.