India will be first country to dissociate healthcare from wealth, says Narayana Health founder Devi Shetty

Dr Devi Shetty, founder and chairman Narayana Health in conversation with Viren Shetty, executive vice-chairman, Narayana Health at Moneycontrol's second edition of Startup Conclave.

People of India are lucky to have been born in the right country at the right time, founder and chairman Narayana Health and renowned cardiac surgeon Dr Devi Shetty has said, adding Indians won the “uterine lottery”.

Shetty, who uses economies of scale to bring down the cost of surgeries, especially cardiac procedures, said India's healthcare system is on the cusp of change and the transformation will happen over the next decade, reaching the masses.

"All of us won the uterine lottery irrespective of how talented you are. If you were born in Afghanistan, it wouldn't have mattered how talented you are. You could have been born in war-torn areas but luck favoured you and you were born in the right uterus," Shetty said during the second edition of Moneycontrol's Startup Conclave in Bengaluru on August 9.

Speaking at the Heart to Heart: When profit meets purpose session, the doctor said luck is an important factor in our lives.

He added, "If I was born 500 years earlier, there is nothing I could have done. There was no entrepreneurship, there was no innovation. We were all born in the right country at the right time. So, we should thank God for giving us the blessings."

"If there is any country that is ruled directly by God, it is India,” he said, adding India will be the first country in the world to dissociate healthcare from wealth. “India will prove to the world that the wealth of the nation or wealth of the family has nothing to do with the quality of health care its citizens will enjoy." the 71-year-old, once described as “Henry Ford of heart surgery” by American media for the low cost of heart surgeries, said.

He is confident that the transformation in India's healthcare will not take some 50 or 100 years but it will happen over the next decade.

"It (transformation in India's healthcare) is going to happen within the next five to 10 years. The transformation in reaching out to the masses, mass healthcare will happen in a very short period of time," he said.

Just like several other things healthcare too will be democratised in the country, he said.

"Look at mobile communication. Is there a separate mobile telephone network for the poor people and the rich people? Shetty asked. "The slum dwellers and the richest man living in their mansion have the same network. Similarly, is there a TV channel only for the poor people or a TV channel only for the rich people? We have democratised entertainment. Similarly, healthcare will also reach out to everyone," he said.

Healthcare is delivered by people and “we are blessed to have 1.3 billion people”. Some of the outstanding doctors, nurses, and technicians in the world, they're all Indians, Shetty noted. "We are a privileged nation," he said.

The Narayana Health founder said that the only missing link in healthcare is people do not have the money to pay for it. "We believe healthcare will transform and that will become an agent of making the working-class people and the poor people pay for the healthcare and that transformation will happen very fast," he said.

Though he didn’t elaborate on how the poor will pay for healthcare, Narayana Health is venturing into health insurance aimed at the working-class.

The so-called uterine lottery, also described as “ovarian lottery”, refers to the randomness of birth – an individual has no control over the country, the family or the circumstances they are born into. A debatable concept, it argues that these random but significant events have a bearing on how one's life shapes up.