Dollars for Scholar

Graduate student, Nirav Shah, is no stranger to challenge - having pursued a joint degree in Medicine and Law.

Funded by the Henry Luce scholarship, he has already applied his medical knowledge to reforms in Cambodia’s health care system. And as the new recipient of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, he will return to the Cambodia to help reform its justice system.
William Harms reports Nirav Shah first worked in Cambodia to deter corruption in the health care system.

Through the [Henry Luce] scholarship, he was chief economist for the National Institute of Public Health in Phnom Pehn from 2002 to 2003. In that position, Shah helped decrease the potential for corruption by reducing the number of decisions being made by local and national health care authorities.

Shah's comments tend to help demonstrate the accuracy of Dr Beat "Beatocello" Richner's claims that of health care system was in dire need of reform.

“We tend to think of corruption as being a moral problem, but I looked at the ways in which it is an institutional problem,” Shah said. “In the previous system, decisions about health care needed to be approved at 13 different steps, each providing an opportunity for a bribe to move the decision along.”

Something that is not mentioned in Dr Richner's lectures is that corrective action has been taken by people such as Shah.

Apparently through Shah’s work, the health care system was reformed to require only six steps of approval. As a result, according to the William Harms report, more funds were now available to care for Cambodian people seeking health services.

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