Dr. India!
will a completely free system work? Can we succeed where countries like UK have failed? The lessons from USA are also tough. America spends $2,548 per person on healthcare. Still Americans are coming here to get treatment. So where will India end up, spending barely $7 per person? There are many answers to this riddle, one of which comes from an Erode-based physician, Dr. Jeevanantham. He sets up small hospitals ranging in investment from Rs. 70 lakh to Rs. 3 crore on a noprofit no-loss basis. The hospitals are run as cooperative organizations with over 70 people contributing through 3-year interest free loans. Since there is no profit motive for the investors, treatment charges can be kept at a bare minimum – often only 30% of what private hospitals charge. But it is a tough business. To make maximum utilization of funds, Dr. Jeevanantham has to carefully source his medical equipments – one of the biggest cost worries in hospital management. He goes in for Russian
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are rare in India, he says. One of their hospitals was funded by Indian Medical Council doctors and the public, and inaugurated by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam last year. But can experiments like Dr. Jeevanantham’s be replicated fast enough across the country? Highly unlikely, as it requires socially committed people like him, in thousands, for that to happen. Besides, the cooperative model is not a free model. Other visionaries conversant with India’s healthcare challenge swear by easily affordable health insurance products. Several NGOs and a few state governments have come up with such schemes. Probably the best known among them is the Yashasvini scheme designed by Dr. Devi Shetty and implemented by the Karnataka Government in cooperation with hundreds of private hospitals in the state.