Outsourcing Surgery

The post about nurses got me thinking, and I remembered an interesting article I just read. In this month's Time magazine there's an article about the low cost of quality health care in other countries. Perspctive doctors come to the U.S., are formally trained according to U.S. standards, and then go back to their own country. Now companies are selling "surgery vacations."

These are very reputable companies saving uninsured, and insured people thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on high cost procedures. You can get a vacation to singapore, have a procedure done by a very competent American-trained doctor, and come back for thousands less than the inflated American system. Just to compare prices:

Heart Bypass surgery - U.S. retail cost = $122,424
Singapore = $20,000

Knee Replacement - U.S. retail cost = $40,640
India = $8,500

I for one, think this is great. I don't want to see the quality of medical care suffer, but if it can stay somewhat stable and save thousands of dollars for people needing non-cosmetic surgery I'm all for it. What's more, companies are starting to offer their employees the option to go out of the country with their healthcare plans. The kicker is the companies are willing to give back up to 25% of their savings in health care directly to the employee getting the procedure. Wow. Here's an excerpt from the article:

U.S. hospitals could certainly do with a little global competition. For years, their share of the national heath-care bill has grown at a rate far faster than inflation, and today they gobble up a third of all medical expenditures. At current rates, the U.S. will be spending $1 of every $5 of its GDP on health care by 2015, yet more than 1 in 4 workers will be uninsured. The ingrained inefficiency of most hospitals doesn't help. "A lot of them still don't know how to schedule their operating rooms efficiently," says Reinhardt. "They've never had to. They always get paid, no matter how sloppy they are."