Healthcare Cost Reduction Ahead

Better Care At One Tenth The Cost, 3/2/16, Forbes

“The problem with Obamacare is that it is focused on finding the money to pay for what good healthcare costs; instead we should be focused on lowering the cost of healthcare so that people can afford it. ”

So says Dr. Devi Shetty, a world renowned heart surgeon who owns and manages about 32 hospitals in India. At 62 years of age, he has already performed over 20,000 surgeries. That’s about five or six times the number a typical American surgeon performs over a life time. Remarkably, he has successfully performed surgery on a fetus while it was still in the womb. He was the personal physician to Mother Teresa.

What is most important to know about Shetty, however, is that he has discovered a way to provide high quality healthcare (better than what most American patients receive) for about one-tenth of the cost that we typically pay.

Shetty’s methods have been studied by such institutions as Stanford and Harvard. He practiced medicine at Guy’s hospital in London before returning to India. Today he is able to perform heart surgery for about 1/3 less than what it cost him in India 26 years ago.

Think about that. There is nothing in American medicine that costs less than it did 26 years ago. In fact, you probably can’t find a medical service that costs less than it did a year ago.

So, given the importance the Obama administration has placed on lowering the cost of care and the billions of dollars they have spent pursuing that goal with pilot programs and demonstration projects, you would expect that Shetty was in on the ground floor when the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was being created.

In fact, he wasn’t even consulted. Worse, the ACA actually contains a moratorium on doctor-owned hospitals. Shetty cannot come here and show Americans how to produce high-quality, low-cost care, even if he wants to. Not to be deterred, Shetty has set up a demonstration hospital right on our door step — in the Cayman Islands — and it’s recruiting American patients at this very moment. More on that below

Shetty’s success is not a secret. The Economist notes that: He has … applied the production line techniques of Henry Ford to cardiac surgery and has brought sophisticated healthcare to millions of low-income Indians.

About Shetty’s flagship hospital, Narayana Hrudayalaya, a Harvard Business School report says: The purpose of the hospital was to offer healthcare for the masses….. The interesting aspect of its business formula was its ability to offer such complex surgeries as CABG (popularly known as bypass surgery) for about $2,000, which was substantially less than other similarly equipped hospitals in India. 

A Wharton school publication says: Patients at his hospital get cardiac care at a cost lower than any other hospital in the country and at a fraction of what it would cost elsewhere in the world… 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2016/03/02/better-care-at-one-tenth-the-cost/#769e8b832fa9