Surgery & the Taj Mahal ...what a deal!

[serryjw]

quote......
Carl Garrett, a paper-mill technician in Leicester, N.C., is scheduled to travel Sept. 2 to New Delhi, where he will undergo two operations. Though American individuals have gone abroad for cheaper operations, Mr. Garrett is a pioneer of sorts.
He is a test case for his company, Blue Ridge Paper Products, Inc., in North Carolina, which is set to provide a health benefit plan that allows its employees and their dependents to obtain medical care overseas beginning in 2007.


"It's brand-new and nobody's ever heard of going to India or even South Carolina for an operation, so it's all pretty foreign to people here," says Garrett. "It's a frontier."

Garrett's medical care alone may save the company $50,000. And instead of winding up $20,000 in debt to have the operations in the US, he may now get up to $10,000 back as a share of the savings. He'll also get to see the Taj Mahal as part of a two-day tour before the surgery.

end quote........
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0816/p03s03-usec.html

[spinbaby]

1. I've talked to someone who did this

Joint replacement. No insurance so he paid out of pocket and went to India. He claimed that the care was better than here. Something is very, very wrong with our medical system.

[Deja Q]

9. So instead of fixing it, people go overseas instead...

That's not helping the problem. :(

[Tesha]

10. No, but it might bring some doctors around to seeing the dangers of...

> So instead of fixing it, people go overseas instead...
>
> That's not helping the problem.

No, but it might bring some doctors around to seeing the
dangers of outsourcing now that their jobs are being
outsourced to India too! Up until now, doctors and their
union (the AMA) have been a fairly centrist-to-rightist
group of folks, standing in the say of some fundamental
changes (like universal health care) that we really need
in this country.

Tesha

[politicat]

2. Honestly, with some operations, I'd be willing.

The care for my knee surgeries is supposed to be better in India and Argentina. Here, the hospital kicked me out after 12 hours, with a fever and before my stomach had started working again and before they found out that percoset makes me crazy. And it still cost us $2000 after the insurance paid their 70%.

A friend who had the same surgery in Bangalore said that she was in hospital for four days, and they did a lot of physical therapy before they released her.

Emergency or heart surgery? Not so much. But something orthopedic? Yeah, I'd take it. Orthos rarely require blood, too.

[serryjw]

3. Soooooooooo would I!

The 60 Minutes show about 6 months ago showed the hospital that are nicer than our best hotels. Your point about blood transfusions had not occurred to me...will check it. My concern is how many more industries/jobs are we going to loose to better/cheaper available around the world?

[kskiska]

4. I saw that program, too, and was very impressed.

A woman had surgery that wasn't available here. The hospital was luxurious and she was even given a low-cost recovery period at a resort before returning home. Indian doctors are returning home from the states to practice at these hospitals.

[serryjw]

5. For all those with no health

insurance, it makes sense to self finance yourself with savings and go there.Can you still write medical cost off your taxes? I wish I knew how well they are screening blood?

[politicat]

7. I think it will equal out, to be honest.

There's always going to be a need for emergent care, and most of the lab, diagnostic and imaging work will still need to be done here. Babies are still going to be born and people are still going to break their arms. In fact, if US hospitals can shunt the planned surgeries away from internal and concentrate on emergent and local care, it may actually improve the quality of care. (I know that my knee surgery was rescheduled four times because the OR kept getting overbooked... and this was at Boulder Community Hospital!) I'd like to see where this is going to go, and if there's any way to study it.

DH and I have had this discussion a couple of times, regarding the exit sourcing of tech workers, since he's a senior level programmer. He's starting to see companies bringing their software dev back inhouse since it is ultimately cheaper to have it inhouse (for a lot of reasons) and he's slowly seeing tech support coming back for similar reasons. He's very supportive of the programmers that are not currently working in their fields, but at the same time, he sees some of the problems (like the fact that their degrees taught them to use COBOL, but not JAVA, or that their programs taught them to copy paste code from the web rather than learning to write it or that the developers have not kept up with their skillsets...) that make it harder for junior and midlevel programmers to get hired. And of course there's always the crowd that wants to earn XXX,000 for playing Quake all day....

[paulk]

6. I know many people who have done this sort of thing

Joint replacements in India, dental work in Thailand.

The work is up to western standards, it's affordable, and you get to recuperate on the beach.

[Deja Q]

8. LOL - when the price of gas gets high enough, we'll want

American doctors locally again.

The selling of America.

OTOH, this may fix the raping of Americans by the medical industry.