Asher Hasan is on a quest to provide health insurance to the working poor in the developing world

Asher Hasan is on a quest to provide health insurance to the working poor in the developing world. He's starting with Pakistan.In April Margaret Fernandes, a 37-year-old homemaker in Karachi, experienced a sharp pain in her side. But unlike many people in Pakistan and elsewhere in the developing world, Fernandes had access to top-notch medical care. After an ultrasound diagnosed kidney stones, she received treatment at the Jinnah Hospital Kidney Center. Her husband, Augustine, earns $3,500 a year working for a chain of coffee shops, supporting Margaret and nine other family members, and the procedure would've cost a third of his income.The Fernandes family, however, paid nothing for Margaret's treatment. Employees at small companies in the developing world are almost always uninsured, but through a program called Naya Jeevan, the Fernandes family receives subsidized health insurance from Augustine's employer. Without the insurance Margaret might have taken painkillers and hoped for the best, taken out a short-term high-interest loan from an informal lender or sold possessions. "We don't have the money to pay these expenses," she says.
Yahoo! BuzzNaya Jeevan, which means "new life" in Urdu and Hindi, offers a financial safety net in Pakistan, where approximately 30 million people--one-sixth of the population--work in the urban labor market and live on the edge of poverty. They are one health emergency away from losing their homes or requiring their children to work instead of attending school. Naya Jeevan signs on with multinational corporations, microfinance organizations, schools and other institutions to offer a health plan to their low-income workers and the domestic staff of their higher-income employees. A manager at Unilever, for example, can make tax-deductible contributions that cover 100% of his cook's or driver's premium. (In the future Hasan hopes that Unilever and the beneficiary will contribute 10% each.) The plan costs $2.50 a month per adult and $1.25 per child.Asher Hasan--a 38-year-old doctor-turned-entrepreneur who has American, British and Pakistani citizenship--started Naya Jeevan. He was born outside of London to Indian parents who migrated to Pakistan at the time of the partition. As a child he made frequent trips to Karachi to visit his grandparents. "I was upset that kids my age were selling things on the street and begging in some cases," he says. "In England even low-income people have a reasonable standard of living."
Hasan's life changed after his father died in 1983. His mother moved him and his three sisters to Karachi, settling them in a spacious house near the grandparents, and then returned to the U.K. to tie up loose ends. That's when she suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the next three years in a hospital. Hasan and his siblings somehow made ends meet on an educational stipend that his father's bank provided them. "We went from living an affluent lifestyle to almost living on the poverty line," recalls Hasan. "The experience gave us the opportunity to see what it was like to be on the outside looking in."
Eventually he moved to the U.S. for school and, for a time, focused on making money. He attended medical school and then dropped out of his surgery residency to pursue a lucrative career in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. But while pursuing his M.B.A. at New York University he became dissatisfied with what he felt was the lack of a "higher purpose" in his life. He knew that he wanted to apply business principles to making a social impact and to use his background in medicine.