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India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

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Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#21
post #5

The beauty of (Indian) democracy is that every 5 years the year before election an innovative world saving scheme that is expensive would be implemented or started.

Across almost all metrics, infrastructure, corruption, ease of business, electricity, even cleanliness India has improved on. This isn't just another election year innovation, this is just another list of innovations that have been added, which also include things like investments in clean energy, and providing rural impoverished citizen with gas to cook (people in rural areas would cook in wood fired stoves that wou…

This is totally wrong information about the current state of affairs of India.

1. Ease of doing business

The Indian government had stopped LLP registrations all together for no official reason. For Pvt ltd registrations from past June 10th rejections to form a new company or even subsidiary company has skyrocketed.

Source: LLP halt is reported in media, which still has some spine to stand against the government. Regarding rejections, all data is hidden even from RTI but you can talk with literally any CA/CS to understand the nightmare of MCA.

2. Investors

Its straight 5th-year FII has removed billions of dollars from the Indian market. Still, Indian Sensex is surging on the wave of the domestic mutual fund industry. Those "mutual funds Sahi hai" ads didn't start out of nowhere. There's no problem with the rise of the mutual fund industry, but to use it as a parameter for Indian economy's performance is nuts. Actually, rational investors are actively avoiding the Indian market.

Source: moneycontrol.com

Regarding corruption, infrastructure, education, jobs, credit rates and liquidity and other macroeconomic parameters, in general, are totally telling a different story. It would be really good to have the facts for all of the above claims. If I get to see the facts, I'll be satisfied with the claims.

Wake up before its too late! I just want people to question their government rather than defending them, irrespective of any political party.

Edit: Fixed indentation.

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#22
post #2

The math doesn't check out. "Each family would get more than $7,200 in annual coverage"; "better health care for 1.3 billion people" and "Modicare is expected to cost the Indian government less than $2 billion annually" seem to be mutually exclusive. There's no reasonable way for health insurance/coverage to be so underutilized that on average only $1-$2 of $7200 would get used.

You should hear our respected PM's (PM Modi) speeches (pick pretty much any) and ruling party's (BJP) statements and you would get used to math and facts not checking out.

I used to think those were just slips and mistakes. It took a couple of years for me to finally understand that those were indeed mistakes but "calculated" ones.

It works like this - you declare "every household will get X by the end of 3rd year" and you know that 80% will be just euphoric to hear that and after 6 months they will forget it was 3 years - they are your fans. Once you say something they take it onto them to defend you and what you said forever, no matter how absurd it was. You will also know that out of remaining 20% like 1-2% will dig into it and out of that 1-2% a minuscule will have the guts and acumen to speak out and if they do that previous 80% will take care of this fractional percentage who speaks out either by drowning their voice with their collective noise or bully or silence them somehow. "Somehow" also includes "non-peaceful" means (very effective in silencing people).

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Across almost all metrics, infrastructure, corruption, ease of business, electricity, even cleanliness India has improved on. This isn't just another election year innovation, this is just another list of innovations that have been added, which also include things like investments in clean energy, and providing rural impoverished citizen with gas to cook (people in rural areas would cook in wood fired stoves that wou…

This is totally wrong information about the current state of affairs of India. 1. Ease of doing business The Indian government had stopped LLP registrations all together for no official reason. For Pvt ltd registrations from past June 10th rejections to form a new company or even subsidiary company has skyrocketed. Source: LLP halt is reported in media, which still has some spine to stand against the government. Rega…

1. Business Ranking

"India climbs global business ranking. But it's not that simple" https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/31/news/economy/india-ease-of-...

2012 - 132

2013 - 132

2014 - 134

2015 - 142

2016 - 130

2017 - 130

2018 - 100

http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/india

Samsung is also opening the world's largest Mobile phone manufacturing plant in India. That's a tremendous investment from them.

2. Corruption

India's Corruption Ranking

2011 - 95

2012 - 94

2013 - 94

2014 - 85

2015 - 76

2016 - 79

2017 - 81

https://tradingeconomics.com/india/corruption-rank

3. Infrastructure

Road construction by km per day built / awarded

"While a total of 4,410 km highway stretches were constructed in 2014-15, it increased to 9,800 km in 2017-18." Furthermore just look at the spending. It's booming.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/highway-constructi...

4. Electricity

There's pretty consistent growth, although growth isn't the only story. A strong reliable grid is also important, along with having investments in green technology to make the electricity generation more green. Reliability isn't up to standards yet, but it has gotten better, in my opinion. There have also been tremendous investments from the government in green tech, like solar.

https://tradingeconomics.com/india/total-electricity-output-...

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#24
post #2

The math doesn't check out. "Each family would get more than $7,200 in annual coverage"; "better health care for 1.3 billion people" and "Modicare is expected to cost the Indian government less than $2 billion annually" seem to be mutually exclusive. There's no reasonable way for health insurance/coverage to be so underutilized that on average only $1-$2 of $7200 would get used.

Great observation. You are absolutely right. Unfortunately, the public does not care about, or understand, numbers, probability, expectation or black swans, and the politicians know that at a gut level. I wish there was a consistent way to call out such bullshit in a way that matters.

But the history of humanity vis-a-vis rhetoric from the time of Demosthenes is not entirely inspiring.

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#25
>> which would offer the poorest half of India health insurance to apply toward private hospitals

This is a terrible idea. Did they learn nothing from the failure of Health Care in the United States? When insurance pays for everything patients stop worrying about costs, which in turn causes hospitals and drug companies to raise prices. This is what has caused Health Care to fail from a costs point of view.

The solution is to make the consumer participate in driving costs down.

In the US, one employer I know of has an excellent solution to the problem: Make employees pay 100% of the bill up to a certain amount, such as $6000. That's a large amount, but the employer then contributes a large amount to your Health Savings Account (HSA), such as $4000. This amount is for you to keep regardless of whether you have any health bills or not. (This money can be used for medical expenses only, but can be used any time, including after retirement). So the maximum you will spend out of pocket per year is $2000. How does this encourage the consumer to scrutinize and control medical expenditure? Because the first $6000 of medical spending in a year is "your money". This is money you'd be able to keep in your HSA if you didn't have any medical expenses. This gives the consumer a strong incentive to reduce costs, question charges, avoid unnecessary services, and so on.

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#26
post #25

>> which would offer the poorest half of India health insurance to apply toward private hospitals This is a terrible idea. Did they learn nothing from the failure of Health Care in the United States? When insurance pays for everything patients stop worrying about costs, which in turn causes hospitals and drug companies to raise prices. This is what has caused Health Care to fail from a costs point of view. The soluti…

$4k is not a “large amount”. I buy my own insurance and cheapest plan that covers anything at all is $13k/yr for a family of 3. If that’s all this employer is contributing, the employees are getting shafted.

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#27
post #25

>> which would offer the poorest half of India health insurance to apply toward private hospitals This is a terrible idea. Did they learn nothing from the failure of Health Care in the United States? When insurance pays for everything patients stop worrying about costs, which in turn causes hospitals and drug companies to raise prices. This is what has caused Health Care to fail from a costs point of view. The soluti…

$4k is not a “large amount”. I buy my own insurance and cheapest plan that covers anything at all is $13k/yr for a family of 3. If that’s all this employer is contributing, the employees are getting shafted.

The GP was probably just making up numbers or basing it on costs for a single person.

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#28
post #25

>> which would offer the poorest half of India health insurance to apply toward private hospitals This is a terrible idea. Did they learn nothing from the failure of Health Care in the United States? When insurance pays for everything patients stop worrying about costs, which in turn causes hospitals and drug companies to raise prices. This is what has caused Health Care to fail from a costs point of view. The soluti…

This is not a problem in India as a lot of treatment s in govt run hospitals is free for low income people. But then, the problem is that such hospitals are hugely overused and the quality of care suffers. By enabling the poor to use private options the demand can be better distributed between private and public.

Re: India Aims for the World's Biggest Health Care Overhaul

#29
post #25

>> which would offer the poorest half of India health insurance to apply toward private hospitals This is a terrible idea. Did they learn nothing from the failure of Health Care in the United States? When insurance pays for everything patients stop worrying about costs, which in turn causes hospitals and drug companies to raise prices. This is what has caused Health Care to fail from a costs point of view. The soluti…

That is one of the best ideas I have heard on healthcare so far. I wonder which company that is.

One thing I would add to that plan is to provide free annual/biannual preventive health checkups.

The incentive shouldn’t be so much that consumers stop going to a doctor at all.

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