Dr C V Krishnaswami and his team of medical researchers based out of Chennai have come out with a Grand Health Ensurance Plan, a revolutionary, completely transparent and inclusive health insurance model to provide health for all at unbelievably low premiums.
Dr Krishnaswami, 82-year-old medical scientist and a widely respected diabetologist, studied all health insurance schemes operational in many developed countries like Britain, USA (National Health Service ) and understood their shortcomings before developing a scheme in which the rich pay for their health insurance with which the poor too would get quality medical care.
Speaking to The Pioneer, Dr Krishnaswami said the exorbitant costs charged by corporate and private hospitals were the direct result of the lobbying by pharma companies that saw big opportunities in converting Healthcare into Medical care.
“The focus shifted from health oriented to economy oriented. Mortality rates due to Adverse Drug Reaction and unnecessary interventions shot up many fold,” he explained.
The attraction of this scheme is that those who earn Rs 30,000 per month and their families need not pay anything for the health insurance and they will get quality medical care which the rich gets in corporate hospitals.
Dr Krishnaswami describes the NHS as a politically controlled State monopoly that is inefficient, outdated and unsustainable.
“It sentences thousands of critically ill people to death by putting them on waiting lists a year or more long or by denying them life-saving drugs made in Britain and exported elsewhere. Britain has the most nationalised health service in the developed world and suffers the consequence of having the worst health service in the developed world in never-ending crisis causing unnecessary misery and premature death,” said Dr Krishnaswami quoting from a report by The King’s Fund, an organisation that gives insight on health and care policies.
The team led by Dr Krishnaswami incorporated the important features of NHS, the Grameen Bank founded by Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus of Bangladesh who introduced the microcredit or grameen credit (provision of loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral), Kaiser Permanente Model of California (a pre-paid integrated system consisting of three distinctly separate but related entities- a health plan that bears insurance risk, medical group of physicians and a hospital system) and of course Chennai’s own Voluntary Health Services Model which grades its beneficiaries into four economic groups.
“This model projects Preventive, Promotive as well as Curative aspects of Healthcare and has as its goal, the lessening of the tertiary care burden. The present Indian health sector scenario is clearly inadequate and ineffective in providing health for all at affordable rates or free of charge for the huge bottom layers of the pyramid of our population totalling nearly 800 million,” said Dr Krishnaswami.
As per the Grand Health Ensurance scheme drawn out by Dr Krishnaswami and his team, the affordable persons pay one per cent of their total income per annum and this automatically covers Health Ensurance of one or two persons of their choice for one year. “This model is self generating, economically sustainable and can be scaled up or down to cover the entire country of our 1.3 billion,” he said.
This innovative health insurance scheme has been accorded instant recognition as international peer reviewed journals like “Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes” got the scientific paper published in its issue.