NEW DELHI: A comparison of costs of cardiac procedures across seven Asian countries has shown that most procedures were more expensive in India than in South Korea, a country with a per capita income five and a half times as high as India’s.The cost data is in PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars, which values currencies against each other based on what they can actually buy in their own markets rather than on the official exchange rate. In India, the study covered some 50 hospitals – mostly private, but a handful of them were government-run – across major cities. The average cost of a procedure is the figure taken into account.At the time of the study, 2011 to 2014, India had the highest cost of angioplasty other than in Singapore, but that was before the prices of cardiac stents were capped by the pharmaceutical pricing regulator in 2017. The cost of most procedures in India was cheaper than in China or Thailand but more expensive than in South Korea and Vietnam.China and Thailand have per capita incomes about two and a half times that of India. South Korea’s per capita income is 5.4 times India’s while Vietnam’s is almost equal to India’s. Thus, barring Vietnam, most of the countries being compared are much more affluent than India. Yet, the cost of most procedures in China is just 13-25% more than in India. Vietnam, where only 6% of health facilities are privately owned, had the cheapest rates for all procedures barring bypass, which was slightly cheaper in India and much more so in South Korea.The study, published in the journal BMC Cardiovascular Disorders, compared costs for ECGs (electrocardiography), cardiac markers, echocardiography, angiography, angioplasty with one drug eluting stent, angioplasty with a bare metal stent, heart bypass surgery (CABG) and one day’s stay in a cardiac intensive care unit.The cost of angioplasty with a single drug eluting stent in India was double that in China and over four times the cost in South Korea, countries that have their own stent manufacturing industry. In Thailand and Vietnam, it was closer to the Indian cost though lower. The cost of coronary bypass was lower in India than in all countries except South Korea.“The cost of stenting in India was found to be comparable to high income countries in Asia but this would have come down a bit after the capping of stent prices. The study reflects the cost before the capping,” explained Dr JP Sawhney who heads the cardiology department of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and was the lead author of the study from India.In Singapore, the cost of most procedures was several times that in the other countries in the study, but then again, Singapore‘s per capita GDP in 2017 was higher than most European countries and more than 13 times that of India. Obviously, prices in Singapore or even Hong Kong with PPP per capita incomes being among the highest in the world, are not really meaningful comparisons for most Asian countries. Even so, the cost of stenting in Hong Kong was cheaper than in India.