Americans are traveling abroad for surgery nowadays, Why?
procedure
Heart bypass America 130,000 India 10,000 Thailand 11,000
Heart valve replacement 160,000 9,000 10,000
angioplasty 57,000 11,000 13,000
hip replacement 43,000 9,000 12,000
knee replacement 40,000 8,500 10,000
The accompanying story in The Detroit Free Press is of a couple that went to India for a liver transplant. He was an uninsured former broker. Cost was 450,000 in America. Including a 10 week stay in India ,the cost was 58,000.
Some fortune 500 companies are offering bonuses to employees who will travel abroad for surgery. People who have gone have lauded the care and nursing compared to here.
So what is safe .? Doctor visits and dentistry.
Apparently, Hungary is the go to place for dentistry these days.
Perhaps doctors and hospitals should cut their rates to compete. Doctors will be making much less. Hospitals will be outsourced to India.
Only emergency care will be here.
Doctors and nurses, from everything I’m aware of have high stress jobs that require them to work awful hours. Cutting back their salaries will ultimately shrink the pool of people willing to enter the profession. Yet we also have fewer doctors and nurses per person (PDF) than other OECD (modern) countries.
I’m not real sure what the cause of this situation is. I would suspect that being trained to become a physician is a more expensive thing in the US. Presumably due to regulations of some sort.
Medical schools are already outsourced. American schools are expensive, elite and too small. American kids can’t get in. But we can import (darn good) doctors from elsewhere.
I would be perfectly willing to go elsewhere for surgery. Eager to do it.
As for dentistry, Syria is good I hear.
็But why should doctors be expected to work marathonic shifts?, reduce the workload and stress and even with lower salaries you´ll still have that pool of people willing to become doctors.
Are those the prices for procedures in various places?
I know cosmetic surgery tourism is on the rise here in SA. People come here “on safari” and go home after the swelling’s down. Hell, at the fancier places they throw in an *actual *game safari too.
So it looks like Miami and Malibu are going to suffer from outsourcing just as much as Detroit and Silicon Valley.
The whole world costs are being smeared into a lower level hodge podge. Wages cuts and outsourcing which the upper classes met with glee are going to be much more across the board than they expected. If it can be done cheaper somewhere else it will. No jobs are safe. No standard of living is guaranteed.
No the answer is; American doctors are burdened by the threat of lawsuits, and consequent high malpractice insurance premiums. The lawyers always deny it, but a neurosurgeon paying $150,000/year in insurance has to pass on this immense expense. Read the fine print: if your surgeon in India screws up, your lawsuit must be heard in an INDIAN court. Your chances of recovery are quite different.
Eventually, the legal industry will successfully drive health care out of the USA
Considering that most lawmakers and judiciary have legal backgrounds, there is inertia to keep things the way they are. Intelligent young people will choose law over medicine to maximize personal gain. Increasingly, medical professionals are immigrants, anyhow.
Americans who want to be doctors, but don’t want to put up with long hours and malpractice insurance still have plenty of cushy options (or rackets). Optometry is fairly blunder-proof, has easy hours, and is easy to bilk suckers out of hefty eye exam costs and overpriced eyewear.
The training is essentially free in France (as it is for most other fields), and I suspect in most other european countries too.
This, added to a (in my opinion stupidely strict) numerus clausus for physicians results in a lot of students failing at the competitive exams at the end of the first year of medcal training. I still think it’s worth it.
I assume that the long shifts are due to the shortages of staff. You can’t just let people die from insufficient attention for 10 to 20 years just to promote the idea that the medical profession has a nice schedule. :dubious:
You could allow more students to med schools. The shortage , if there is one, is artificial. One of my racketball friends is a dentist. His third kid is going to med school next year. The first 2 graduated and don’t want to practice. One is going to law school now. Once inside they did not see the glamor. He spent a fortune on education.
I read that a small part of the people who could sue for malpractice actually do. It is the insurance companies that are causing the problem.
You can’t propose a system like this without also changing the medical education system, as well. The average tuition for a year of medical school is 16,153 at public scools and $32,588 at private schools. This doesn’t include room, board, books, or any other expenses. In addition, the average graduate of medical school has $139,517. On top of that, there’s a 3-year residency where a graduate only makes about $35,000. So, you can’t expect doctors to just cut their rates and make themselves unable to pay their student loans. In addition, there’s a lot of sacrifice involved in becoming a doctor- medical school involves long, long hours. Residencies involve even more hours. Most specialists have to go through a fellowship after residency before they’re allowed to practice independently. People should be rewarded for that kind of work/dedication.
St. Urho
-starts applying to medical school next month
Oh but we have to compete. Competition will demand we cut our prices. Of course we could just stop medical flights to foreign countries to save them from sub par medicine .
Joking, people who have gone there have praised the attention and care they got.
Good luck, St. Urho.
Doctors’ salaries are not the cause of high cost medical care in the U.S. Big pharma and corporate run, profit driven health insurance companies are the culprits. I think most people agree – including those in favor of UHC – that doctors should be well compensated.
Thanks! Personally, I’d be fine with making less money and not having >$100,000 in debt, but I agree that’s not really the problem.
I’m curious how many people come to the US from abroad for medical procedures. Around the Cleveland Clinic, which is otherwise in an iffy neighborhood – it’s still reeling from riots that took place over 40 years ago – there are a few five-star hotels that cater mainly to the families of foreign patients. The number of cranes on the horizon near the Clinic make the area look like a mini-Dubai. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but still, there’s always a few large buildings under construction in the area.
Even in lowly Buffalo, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute has its share of medical tourists. They’re not necessarily Canadians seeking elective surgery, either; they’re wealthy Europeans and Arabs.
I get the impression that for more common, foolproof procedures, it’s cheaper to go overseas. For more esoteric medical procedures, or for wealthy Saudi princes who only want the very best, the US is the place to beat,
It has not been happening for a long time. But the future is not good. Heart surgery,valve replacement and angioplasty are the kind of procedures they do,.
The whole point is that it can be done much,much cheaper. That is not a selling point to an Arab oil man. It is to companies that want to cut costs. It is to people with no or poor coverage. In the US that is a rapidly growing market.
FREE??? If France can provide for all those medical instructors, equipment, facilities and et cetera for FREE I think you owe it to the world to tell us how they do it.