Low-cost healthcare: US can take cue from India
Thursday, 17/10/2013
http://paper.hindustantimes.com/epaper/viewer.aspx
WASHINGTON: The US may be good at innovations in medicine, procedures and equipment, but it should learn from India how to keep healthcare affordable, says a new study.
India’s private hospitals provided world-class healthcare at a fraction of US prices using innovative ways to manage costs, personnel, equipment and even real estate.
These hospitals, said the study published in the Harvard Business Review on Tuesday, should serve “as a wake-up call to hospitals in Europe and the US.” Authors Vijay Govindarajan of Dartmouth, and Ravi Ramamurti of Northeastern University, argued that for all the innovations in medicine the US has made “too little progress” in the field of healthcare delivery.
As a result, healthcare became unaffordable without insurance.
President Barack Obama tried to address it through a reform law, which is at the heart of the current fiscal crisis, extending insurance to all and not by cutting costs.The authors studied nine hospitals in India, including Narayana Health, Apollo, HCG, Aravinda Eye Care, CARE Hospitals, LV Prasad Eye Institute and Vaatsalya. Most of them were accredited either with a non-profit organisation that certifies more than 20,000 hospitals in the US, or with its Indian equivalent. The study discounted salaries as a factor. Even after adjusting salaries to match US levels, procedures at Narayana, for instance, cost 4% to 18% less than in any US hospital.
And equipment cost many times more in India.
