Can cost-effective health-care measures that have worked in poorer countries be applied to in the U.S.? That’s the question the WSJ asks amid the debate over how the U.S. can reign in health-care costs. It’s become clear that many stakeholders in the debate are in favor of figuring out what treatments and tests are most effective for patients but not limiting care based on cost. Read J&J CEO William Weldon’s letter on this topic in the Washington Post this morning. One example the WSJ cites is a program run by an AIDS clinic in Alabama that improved its no-show rates dramatically by giving patients prompt appointments and conducting interviews to help determine what factors might make a patient less likely to come back, which mimicks a similar program set up in Zambia. But many Americans believe that more expensive care is better than

cheaper care, says the WSJ. And, there is also the question of whether speed and simplicity — qualities of care often valued in developing countries — mean as much in the U.S., especially if a trade-off is accuracy. For instance, will an $8 device that conducts “a critical blood test” in six minutes time with 90% accuracy, which will be used in India, Brazil and several African nations, supplant the $50 machine used in the U.S. whose accuracy is 97%? “In the developing world, people are willing to make the trade-off in accuracy for simplicity and low cost,” William Rodriguez, who founded Daktari Technologies, makers of the low-cost device, told the WSJ. “In the U.S., that kind of trade-off is a hard sell.” Map via Wikimedia Commons

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Would Developing World’s Low-Cost Strategies Work in U.S.?