NEW DELHI (AP) Digamber Rawat rarely emerges from the tiny windowless room he shares with his parents because a mysterious illness has wasted away the strength in his legs. His family can't afford private health care, but they must pay for it anyway, even when they go to free government hospitals for help.

Rawat said that at a government hospital in central Delhi, a doctor ordered X-rays and scans that could have been performed in-house. "But when we would go to the hospital lab for the tests, they would give us the name of a private clinic and say, 'Go get it done there and then we will look at it,'" he said.

In this Sept. 23, 2014 photo, Indians stand in a queue to get themselves registered to be examined by a doctor at a government hospital in Allahabad, India. India has a network of free government hospitals and around 37,000 primary health care centers across the country, but they are crowded, badly equipped and inadequately staffed. (AP Photo/ Rajesh Kumar Singh) (Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP)

Tests at the hospital lab would have been 1,500 rupees ($25). At a private clinic, they cost more than $130. Rawat's parents make a combined 15,000 rupees ($245) per month, barely enough to feed the family and buy medicine for their 21-year-old son.

"They knew we were poor, but they just didn't care," said Rawat's mother, Bhavna Devi, wiping tears with her threadbare sari.

Rawat's story is played out across India, where hundreds of millions of poor people without any kind of health insurance are forced to seek medical treatment at private clinics because of poor services and corruption at government hospitals. Those clinics are widely accused of ordering unnecessary tests to run up costs.

Government officials, health experts and many physicians agree that India's $74 billion health care industry is preying on poor people, thanks to a cozy nexus among unethical doctors, hospitals and diagnostic laboratories.

Health care costs push some 39 million people into poverty every year in India, according to a 2011 study in the Lancet medical journal.

India has a network of free government hospitals and around 37,000 primary health care centers across the country, but they are crowded, badly equipped and inadequately staffed. Yet patients who turn to expensive private clinics may be subjected to unnecessary medical tests, scans or even surgery, with the referring doctor getting a commission for the work.

Dr. David Berger, an Australian who worked as a volunteer physician in a small hospital in India, created an uproar when he described the practice of referrals and kickbacks in an article published in the British Medical Journal in May. He wrote that when doctors accept kickbacks, it "poisons their integrity and destroys any chance of a trusting relationship with their patients."

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India: Graft in health care impoverishes millions