Growth drivers for Healthcare & Pharma Industry

When India had got independency, average life span of an Indian was 45 years. Thanks to improving healthcare facilities, now the average life expectancy is 69 years. (Link: http://niti.gov.in/content/life-expectancy) While the healthcare industry enabled this glory, it too got fetes to celebrate for itself. With doctors at the top of social respect and income hierarchy and pharma entrepreneurs becoming billionaires, healthcare & pharma sectors are set to become a lot bigger than what they are today. Here are some of the major drivers:

 

1.     Expanding senior population: The population of those aged above 60 living now is higher than ever in the past. Due to age related issues, their need to visit doctors for medial assistance would be much higher than the young population. As the demography of India changes from young to old, this phenomenon of higher medial expenses will only intensify.

 

2.     Increased awareness about healthcare: Couple of decades ago, checking blood pressure, sugar levels, blood tests were not as common as now. For preventive care, routine health checkups have become the norm these days. Also due to lifestyle issues and crappy food, getting the diseases early in their lives is also a common factor leading to more frequent checkups and increased consumption of pills.

 

3.     Ability to pay and insurance coverage: Slowly over the generations, people are being uplifted from poverty and their income levels are improved to afford healthcare costs themselves. For those who are still poor, Govt. does its bit to protect them. And there is a wider insurance coverage available now helping people to take care of unforeseen and higher medical expenses. All these have improved the affordability. With demand side becoming steady, supply of side of hospital network and drug stores too have improved and have a wider reach as well.

 

    All these growth drivers will only intensify with time and make the healthcare industry even bigger. There would be other topics of interest such as contribution of Indian healthcare industry to global phenomenon and the dark side of the industry involving doctor-industry nexus, scams at big pharma companies and large population being social engineered to benefit the pharma industry etc. They would become material for separate blog posts.