Governor ESL Narasimhan of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh has suggested the healthcare and pharmaceutical fraternity to evolve a common minimum affordable pricing system for healthcare and medicines so as to provide affordable healthcare to the common man.  

“Super speciality and multi speciality hospitals are charging too much heavy rates for diagnosing and treating simple diseases. Forcing the patients to undergo unrelated and unnecessary tests is incurring huge healthcare burden on common man and the poor in the villages are far from availing quality healthcare despite of various government schemes and programmes. In my view the family physician practice should be encouraged and every young doctor after completing of his MBBS should compulsory offer two years rural service”, said the Governor.

In his address at the Indo-Global Pharma Expo and Summit 2015 in Hyderabad, the Governor while appreciating the good work done in healthcare and pharmaceuticals by doctors and pharmacists, also insisted on making medicines and healthcare affordable. He suggested that the doctors’ community and pharmaceutical companies should come forward to deliver social corporate responsibility and should work towards making healthcare affordable to the common man.

Regretting with the view of setting up with super speciality, multispecialty and single speciality models of healthcare business, Governor suggested the healthcare providers to also deliver their social responsibility with honesty rather than becoming commercial in every aspect of their service.  “On the lines as Common minimum support price (MSP) to agriculture farmers, the hospitals should also evolve a model of minimum healthcare support pricing plan, where they should fix a common and affordable pricing for diagnosis, medicines and hospital charges and make quality healthcare affordable to the common man,” said Narasihman.

While addressing the gathering earlier, Dr Appaji, Director General of Pharmexcil said that India is a global leader in generic medicines and is meeting 90 per cent of domestic and 70 per cent of global demand with its generic medicines. “Out of 1,60,000 billion global market for generics and patented drugs, India is contributing 25 per cent of global markets, while UK, USA, Japan and Europe are combined contributing 75 per cent. At present the Indian pharmaceutical industry is growing between 12-14 per cent, which is equal to pharma growth in USA,” explained Appaji in his keynote address at the Summit.

Dr Kakarla Subba Rao, former Director of NIMS said, “Every year there are 2.5 million deaths reported due to poor sanitation and unhygienic conditions in India. We need to think innovatively to address the growing disease burden of India. New innovations in healthcare and new drug development in pharma are necessary to deal these challenges in the future,” said Rao.