The High Costs of Healthcare

 "Low-Cost Hospital Design" simply does not yield the same search results as "Low-Cost Housing Design." I could go into the details for why that happens, but one can verify this for themselves. What I will say is that if health care is as much of a basic right as housing, then this does not make sense. The issue is that we are, for the most part, ready to make compromises in housing. We are okay with choosing lower cost materials, using more efficient means of production, reducing the programmatic requirements, and so on. With healthcare, we are reluctant to do the same. With healthcare, everything must be state-of-the-art and high-tech, or else we are scared we'll be in danger. This attitude is now prevalent everywhere. In India, where private hospitals with higher standards of. well, everything have come up in very large numbers in the past two decades, this "nothing but the best" attitude has started to foster distrust towards low-cost public health initiatives like government hospitals and vaccination drives. Needless to say, this distrust isn't helping anybody. The reality is that not everyone can afford "state-of-the-art" and "nothing-but-the-best," and truth be told, not everyone always needs "state-of-the-art" and "nothing-but-the-best." There are many health issues that can be treated with minimal infrastructure as long as people have access to basic services, and hospital design doesn't need to be laborate to provide these services.

What we need are small-scale, easily replicable building designs that can be deployed over diverse territories with ease. These buildings need only to cater to common, easily treatable or routine illnesses and conditions. It must be kept in mind that in many poorer countries, death or prolonged illness are not the result of a lack of the best care but the lack of access to basic care. One would be shocked to know how often children die from diarrhea which can easily be treated if one just has access to basic healthcare. Waiting for hospitals--and the innovations and budgets needed to build hospitals everywhere--is killing people when small clinics can do so much. Using cheap but durable materials and easy methods of construction, clinics need to be built everywhere so that hospitals are needed only in case of more serious illnesses. Lowering high standards of health care infrastructure can ironically be the key to improving public health, and it is high time we embrace this irony.