Health Care Spending & Coverage

The gross domestic product (GDP) or gross domestic income (GDI) is a basic measure of a country's overall economic output. It is the market value of all final goods and services made within the borders of a country in a year. It is often positively correlated with the standard of living, though its use as a stand-in for measuring the standard of living has come under increasing criticism and many countries are actively exploring alternative measures to GDP for that purpose.

Current estimates put U.S. health care spending at approximately 16% of GDP, second highest to East Timor (Timor-Leste) among all United Nations member nations. The Health and Human Services Department expects that the health share of GDP will continue its historical upward trend, reaching 19.5 percent of GDP by 2017.Of each dollar spent on health care in the United States 31% goes to hospital care, 21% goes to physician services, 10% to pharmaceuticals, 8% to nursing homes, 7% to administrative costs, and 23% to all other categories (diagnostic laboratory services, pharmacies, medical device manufacturers, etc.)


It is well known that health expenditure in India is dominated by private spending. To a large extent this is a reflection of the inadequate public spending that has been a constant if unfortunate feature of Indian development in the past half century.

The greater reliance on private delivery of health infrastructure and health services therefore means that overall these will be socially underprovided by private agents, and also deny adequate access to the poor. This in turn has adverse outcomes not only for the affected population but for society as a whole. It adversely affects current social welfare and labour productivity, and of course harms future growth and development prospects.(Source:Hindu Business Line).

Keeping all this in mind, I wonder how should India feel about the current health care proposal by the Obama government? India with it's growing success and GDP will never be in a position to provide such an extensive health coverage/social security coverage to the massive population !

Thoughts ?

The cost and time of developing and bringing a drug to market !

The cost and time of developing and bringing a drug to market is over $900 million and often takes as long as 15 years, if not longer. The cost is mainly attributed to extensive failure rate of clinical trials, 80 % of the drugs fail to clear this stage. A recent study from the Tufts Center for Drug Development concluded that 75% of the drugs that enter phase I move forward to phase II, however, only 42% of those progress to phase III. Of those phase III drugs, only 64% successfully make it through to FDA approval.

In some ways investing in a drug trial is like betting you r money in a casino, of course after analyzing which compounds have a better chance of success. The Food Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that it takes approximately eight and- a-half years to study and test a new drug before it can be approved for the general public. This estimate includes clinical trials using human subjects through the FDA approval process. Preclinical testing can take 6.5 years to complete.

In contrast, the amount paid to market these products is minimalistic compared to the overall cost. It would be interesting to study how much influence does marketing have on the doctors decision as compared to the therapeutic effect of the drug ?

Welcome to the Healthcare Marketing HUB

The aim is to create a portal to discuss the various aspects of marketing in the healthcare industry !

The following definitions were approved by the American Marketing Association Board of Directors:
Marketing:
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Healthcare Marketing is the application of the same principles to the world of Healthcare.