U.S. Health Care Needs a Wakeup Call from India
Global innovators are doing high-quality $1,800 heart surgery. Why aren’t we paying attention?
In Bangalore, India, heart surgeons perform daily state-of-the-art heart surgery on adults and children at an average cost of $1,800. For the record, that’s about 2% of the $90,000 that the average heart surgery costs in the United States. And when it comes to the quality of the heart surgery, the patient outcomes are among the best in the world.
I visited India during Thanksgiving week to meet with Dr. Devi Shetty. He’s the heart surgeon who served as personal physician to Mother Teresa and now runs Narayana Health, with 20 hospitals in India. I wanted to see what the United States could learn from medical innovations undertaken halfway around the world, and how he achieves these impressive clinical results at such a low price.
Read the full column on USA Today.
