Everyone is aware of the saying ‘Prevention is better than cure.’ This holds water not only in terms of health but is also friendly on pocket. Although, the significant economic benefits of preventive healthcare cannot be emphasised enough in terms of reducing long-term healthcare costs, increasing productivity, and improving overall economic output, it still remains neglected and overlooked in our healthcare system. We, Indians, spend around 2 per cent of GDP on healthcare. Even this meagre allocation is spent on seeking care only when illness strikes. This has become the hallmark of our society, managing illness rather than preventing it. However, with rising healthcare costs and an explosion of non-communicable diseases, preventive healthcare can no longer be overlooked. It is high time India shifts its focus from curative health care to preventive health management. Curative healthcare is not only expensive at individual level and destroys household savings, it reduces productivity at the national level and overburdens an already fragile healthcare infrastructure.
Non-communicable diseases have spread like wild fire where a whopping 63 per cent of all deaths in the country are due to life style diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer. India has the second-largest diabetic population. The direct and indirect cost of managing diabetes in more than `1.5 lakh crore per annum. Similarly, cervical cancer, that kills more than 75,000 Indian women each year, is another example of entirely preventable disease. Statistics speak for themselves when comparing the overall cost of curative healthcare with preventive health management. According to Indian Counselling for Medical Research (ICMR), India has 100 million diabetic patients. If an average Indian spends more or less `10,000 per annum for managing diabetes, it comes up to a humongous amount of `1 trillion in direct spending by India on diabetes. This, however, does not account for financial losses due to lost work days of patients and caregivers and possibly early retirement.
While curative healthcare is expensive, preventive healthcare, on the other hand, can have significant economic benefits. According to a WHO report, in developing countries like India, every $1 invested in preventive healthcare can return $7 in economic benefits. These gains come from reduced medication costs and improved productivity from avoiding hospital visits due to fewer sick days. Let’s take an example of Kerala’s cardiac prevention campaign, particularly K-DPP, that significantly reduced the burden of cardiovascular diseases and showed considerable economic benefits. It resulted in a drop of 32 percent in the 10-year cardiovascular disease risk among participants aged 40 and above. If preventive healthcare benefits the society at large, why is it still neglected? The answer lies in behavioural economics. Preventive healthcare is ignored due to the tendency of “Present Bias.” People tend to overvalue immediate rewards (saving money now) and undervalue long-term benefits (early detection, prevention of future health expenses or disease). Even though check-ups might prevent high future costs of medical treatments and possible complications, the pain of spending today feels more significant. Another side of the story is from the healthcare providers’ perspective. For them prevention isn’t profitable in the short term. Revenue for a hospital comes from treatment like surgeries, lab tests, hospital stays, medicines and follow-up visits, and not prevention. Preventive care like counselling and lifestyle coaching is less billable. Also it is hard to attribute value to something not tangible, like preventing a heart attack, as compared to visible, measurable outcome like a successful bypass surgery. So, the ecosystem is heavily skewed towards treatment rather than prevention.
The economics of preventive healthcare is distinct and clear: It is cheaper to keep people healthy than to treat them when they fall sick. However, it remains underused despite being cheaper because people prioritise immediate savings over future benefits. Healthcare systems profit more from treating illness than preventing it, and prevention lacks urgency or visible results. Low awareness, behavioural biases, and poor incentives make prevention a hard sell for both patients and providers.
To increase focus on preventive healthcare, we need Government policies that incentivise prevention and spread public awareness, corporate programs that invest in prevention, and insurance coverage for screenings.
Helping society to manage health proactively is not only morally correct but also makes a great economic sense. After all, if we value our people, we should give precedence to their health before they fall ill, not after.
The writer is finance academic turned health-tech entrepreneur. She writes about the intersection of traditional medicine, technology, and public policy
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