NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Impact investors are monitoring what may be an even more interesting experiment. The efforts by India’s new crop of health care entrepreneurs to sell medical services directly to the more than 1 billion medically underserved people at the base of the country’s economic pyramid.

Already, paying customers — individual patients and their families, rather than insurance companies or the government — control about 80 percent of health care spending in India. A report in December estimated health care spending in India will reach $158 billion in 2017, an annual growth rate of 15 percent.