Achieving Low-Cost Healthcare In Developing Countries
One in every six dollars in the united states gets spent on healthcare. The average cost of a heart medicine, Nexium is approximately 215 $ in the US, while the same medicine costs only 23 $ in the Netherlands. That is almost one-tenth of the cost in America. Medical bills are the root cause of more than 60 % of all personal bankruptcies in the united states. Like you, I too was shocked to hear these facts. I was appalled when I realized how expensive healthcare is in some parts of the world, my knowledge went as far as dental braces here, being three times as expensive as in India, but what was devastating to me was, how people spend their lives trying to get out of debt. I now appreciated the ‘luxury of health’ so much more.
Healthcare is a part of everyday life for a lot of people suffering. 45% of the American population suffers from a chronic disease. (the Almanac of Chronic disease) Cancer, for instance, is currently the second leading cause of deaths in the USA, and the cost of health care for the affected is estimated to reach 174 billion by 2020 (center for disease control and prevention) Americans spend a large sum of money on health care, in fact, according to StatNews, Americans spend 3. 3 trillion $ on healthcare annually, that’s 10,348 $ per person, but why do they need to spend as much? this is because the healthcare sector focuses more on profits than providing reasonable costs to it users. In the Common Wealth Fund report of 2017, USA was ranked last among 11 industrialized nations for overall healthcare performance. On the other hand, there are organizations in India, operating very differently. Hear me out here… The Narayanan Health which is a Cardiac hospital and another healthcare provider called Aravind Eye Care System, both, have very successfully crossed the cost barriers and made profits in spite of being able to provide free health care to millions of people. Aravind Eye Care has given free or highly subsidized surgery to roughly 3 million people, While Narayana does a typical heart surgery at a cost of 21hundred dollars which is tens of thousands of dollars less than what it would cost in the united states.
The first thing that might come to your mind as an explanation for this is lower salaries in India, but you would be wrong. Yes, the salaries of paramedic staff, nurses and administrators in India is dramatically lower than in the US, but even if all the staff including doctors at Narayana health were paid at the US levels its cost for open heart surgery would still only be 3 to 12 percent the cost in the states. These figures I share with you are from the Harvard review. Keep in mind that the cost of high-end equipment and other imported supplies besides land and capital are significantly higher in India than in the US. This gets us to a very important question, how do they do it? Inspired by their aim of providing care to the greatest number possible, these Indian hospitals cut costs to bone. Practices of telemedicine and the use of technology strategically they are experts at multiskilling, delegating less specialized work to lower paid staff. Reusing supplies when it is safe to and manufacturing those that are too expensive to buy, using generic drugs they have become masters of efficiency. Indians have been applying themselves to innovatively finding solutions, reducing health care costs by being creative. Given that the current Indian population is very young, in fact at the present moment 48% of Indians are less than 21 years of age(government census)unless we act quickly we are bound to have a huge challenge at hand. Medical instruments and other technologies produced in developed countries are often too expensive for developing countries and so it is this domestically produced equipment which needs to be further developed, refined and improved to be precise and cost-effective. I would like to share with you a few such examples, from Realclearlife. Dr. Pooja Mukul the Technical Director of a prosthetic clinic in Jaipur India, tied up with a nonprofit product development company to produce the prosthetic knee joint. It offers a cheaper alternative to the regular more, expensive prosthetic option. Her invention is one fifth the cost of any comparable product, thanx to the use of plastic.
This may prove to be a game changer for, thousands, above the knee amputees. Today, only 5% of those in need can avail the prosthetics due to high costs, but people like Dr. Pooja provide hope. In India, 5 percent of the total population suffers from diabetes. They need to regularly monitor their blood glucose levels and are having to buy instruments which are very expensive. To tackle this problem, Times of India reported, that the department of biotechnology (DBT) in association with the central government, came up with a cheaper alternative, the AINA kits. They are connected to any smartphone and can be used to check blood glucose, lipids, creatinine, and hemoglobin levels. Each strip used to check these costs only 10 rupees, which is half a dirham and is thus a very effective and cheap alternative to the older machines. We have so far discussed a developed country, a developing country and now moving our attention to the UAE which we are all very privileged to be residing in and using their infrastructure. UAE spends large sums on health care, in 2017, the UAE allotted 7. 9 percent of the budget amounting to 3. 83 billion dirhams( government statistics). The national agenda in line with vision 2021, the country plans to have world-class healthcare.
Furthermore, the agenda emphasizes the importance of preventive medicine and seeks to reduce cancer and lifestyle-related diseases.
To reduce smoking is one area of focus in the agenda. The UAE does this for all its residents while providing cost-free healthcare to its citizens. In conclusion, achieving low-cost healthcare is possible if we can stay focused on finding innovations that are cost effective. Necessity is the mother of invention. When we look around and see the growing demand for cheaper healthcare it is but natural that individuals will innovate to meet this void. What the leaders need to do is encourage and reward such innovation, so that it gets a strong boost. Developing countries have a need to attend to the masses and at a low cost while other markets like the USA focus on quality and don’t need very large volumes. The quality they look for comes at a cost. Therefore each producing what they have set out to. It would not be wrong to say that we achieve what we set our sight too.
