Por vezes há coisas que nos despertam e dão vontade de partilhar… Como este artigo que acabei de ler na Economist de 22/1 sobre a inovação em tecnologia médica na Ásia… Já cá tinha escrito sobre o assunto, mas a importância de termos consciencia dele é demasiado grande, sob múltiplos aspectos, para não voltar a ele…
“Life should be cheap
How China and India can help cut Western medical bills
…Frugal innovators in China and India are making medical devices that are cheaper—sometimes by an order of magnitude—than their Western equivalents. Companies such as China’s Mindray and India’s TRS serve home markets that include vast numbers of people for whom every yuan or rupee counts. So these companies focus relentlessly on reducing costs. They create products that are stripped to their essentials: scanners that cost $10,000 rather than $100,000; portable electrocardiographs that cost $500 instead of $5,000.
These devices are not merely cheap knock-offs of Western designs. Often they are just as effective as the gold-plated kit used in the West, yet they are rarely found in rich-world hospitals. Their absence helps explain the massive disparity in costs between Western and emerging-world treatments. A night in an American hospital typically costs 25 times as much as a night in an Indian, Brazilian or Chinese one; a night in a European hospital typically costs four times as much.
Western medical-device firms are well aware of eastern innovation. Indeed, firms such as GE Healthcare, Philips and Medtronic are investing heavily in China and India: setting up research centres, hiring local talent and developing frugal inventions of their own, which they gleefully sell both locally and in other emerging markets. Alas, they are not rushing to market such thrifty ingenuity back in America or Europe.
Two main factors keep cheap devices out of Western markets. One is the muting of price signals. Health care is not an efficient market in the rich world because—be it in Europe, where the state typically pays the bills, or in America, where private insurance companies do—the customer does not have to shop around. Patients neither know nor care how much anything costs, so they demand the best of everything, which is wonderful for the makers of hugely expensive equipment.
A second factor—which applies more in America than in Europe—is red tape. America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is excessively risk-averse: it often takes twice as long to approve a new medical technology as European regulators do. America’s confusing approvals process deters upstart medical-technology firms, since they typically lack the deep pockets and army of experts required to navigate it. And for a device to succeed in America it must be blessed not just by the FDA but also by the bureaucrats who oversee Medicare and Medicaid, the two huge government health-care schemes. Obtaining that blessing can take years.
Just as the appearance of cheap, well-engineered Japanese cars disrupted Western car markets, so the rise of frugal technology could transform the market for medical devices. Western politicians need to encourage this to happen. By turning their governments into better purchasers and by eliminating the barriers that discourage the sale of cheap technology in the rich world, they could bring down the cost of health care. That should earn them the gratitude of patients, taxpayers and workers—in other words, voters.”