Most recently, I’ve started grabbing past ‘casts of PBS’ Now, which Bill Moyers used to host.
Today I listened to one from late last year about what’s happening to people in the US middle-class, when a family member suffers a catastrophic medical emergency. Because of the change in the bankruptcy law done at the behest of our corporatocracy, coupled with the astonishing cost of hospital care here (another site I read regularly, described this in vivid economic detail–$38,000 for 1 week stay in a wounding hospital to heal a bed sore from care in the original hospital; $1.7 million total cost of care for the illness), these people can not get out from under these debts for years if ever, in effect pauperizing them as they are recovering.
So short-sighted and stupid to let this happen. It doesn’t have to be that way. Below, an excerpt from Bill Bonner:
In the United States, it costs about $1,650 to perform a cataract operation. You wouldn’t expect many such operations in a country such as India, where per capita income is probably less than $1000. But in India today, there are five hospitals that perform more than 180,000 eye operations each year. Each operation costs only about $110. Most of the patients pay nothing.
This is thanks to Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, who set up his first 12-bed Aravind eye hospital in his brother’s home in Madurai, in 1976. At the time, he was already 57 years old.
Dr. V set out to be an obstetrician. But he was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis at an early age. He spent two years recovering. Because he could no longer deliver babies, he turned to the study of ophthalmology, and designed special tools that suited his hands. He found that he could do eye operations simpler, faster and much cheaper than they had been done before.
The inspiration, he says, comes from McDonald’s. He first discovered the golden arches at the age of 55 and it changed his life.“In America, there are powerful marketing devices to sell products like Coca-Cola and hamburgers,” he says. “All I want to sell is good eyesight, and there are millions of people who need it…If Coca-Cola can sell billions of sodas and McDonald’s can sell billions of burgers, why can’t Aravind sell millions of sight-restoring operations…? With sight, people could be freed from hunger, fear, and poverty.
“In the third world, a blind person is referred to as ‘a mouth without hands,’” says Dr. V. “He is detrimental to his family and to the whole village. But all he needs is a 10-minute operation. One week the bandages go on, the next week they go off. High bang for the buck. But people don’t realize that the surgery is available, or that they can afford it, because it’s free. We have to sell them first on the need.”
The hospital picks up the tab for those who can’t pay. Paying customers are charged 50 rupees (about $1) per consultation and have their choice of accommodations: “A-class” rooms ($3 per day), which are private; “B-class” rooms ($1.50 per day), in which a toilet is shared; or “C-class” rooms ($1 per day), essentially a mat on the floor. Paying customers choose between surgery with stitches ($110) and surgery without stitches ($120).
Since he began, his eye hospitals have restored the sight of more than one million people in India. Even with such tiny revenues per patient, Aravind makes a profit, with a gross margin of 40%. One operation is completed; another is begun right away. It is apparently a very efficient and productive enterprise.
Aravind now does more eye surgeries than any other provider in the world, though it accepts no government grants. The hospitals are totally self-supporting. Nor does Dr. V. try to hustle a profit from the enterprise for himself. He lives on a pension, taking no money out of Aravind.
Dr. V. is helping the poor in a big way. But he also helps them in a way very different from the typical world improver. He sees them as individuals.
“Consultants talk of ‘the poor,’” he says. “No one at Aravind does. ‘The poor’ is a vulgar term. Would you call Christ a poor man? To think of certain people as ‘the poor’ puts you in a superior position, blinds you to the ways in which you are poor - and in the West there are many such ways: emotionally and spiritually, for example. You have comforts in America, but you are afraid of each other.”
Dr. V set out only to do eye operations…quickly and cheaply. The world improvement came - as it always does - as a by-product of private action. In Tamil Nadu state, where his main hospital is located, the incidence of blindness is 20% below the rest of India.
No comments:
Post a Comment