Slashdot Mirror
India Woos Medical Tourists
aspelling writes "It's not only quality hardware and software that can be done in India for a fraction of the cost. BBC reports that India has a generation of world class doctors capable of doing joint replacement, heart, neuro and cancer surgery at their state-of-the-art facilities. Don't be surprised when your physician prescribes you a trip to Bombay. Indian officials are working hard with HMOs around the world to make this dream come true."
In short, they're the people who, without having ever seen or met you, decide the course of your medical treatment based upon which is the most cost effective.
Basically the opposite of a good doctor.
Heh :). Unless the HMO becomes an India corporation, too, the lawsuits will be handled in the U.S. And you can be the insurance industry isn't going to let the profits go from Hartford to Bangalore. So the principals, if not the operation, remain stateside, and are sued right at home.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
My mother went through angioplasty at the Escorts Heart Research Institute (New Delhi, India, http://www.ehirc.com/). Not only did the operation go smoothly, the total cost of the whole procedure (including stay, doctor's fee, consultations, actual procedure, angiography etc) came to under $4000. Out of this $2000 was for the medicated stent used, which is imported from the US.
(PS: This particular hospital performs over 20 angioplasties and around 8 bypass surgeries daily)
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I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
Do I need to point out Bombay is called Mumbai? Sort of a Instanbul/Constantinople thing.
See this page for information.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
"What if I pick a bad doctor and he messes me up"
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In general the average India surgeon operates on many more patients than the US surgeon. It's simple, there are just that many more people in India, and far fewer surgeons. So the level of experience for common procedures is higher in India than in the US. If a medical procedure calls for a cyclotron and a super-computer - the Western countries are where THAT can be done. But a heart bypass - it's done routinely and successfully all the time.
I live in India. My daughter's life has once been saved by the India public (read free) health system. So I'm prejudiced in its favour.
Of course you can get excellent (if expensive) medical / surgical treatment in the US.
And of course some India doctors are venal and money-focussed.
But don't dismiss India doctors and India hospitals as a whole. On the whole they are very very good. And they are about as likely to skip legal consequences (if any) as a US doctor or hospital. Note - the judicial system in India does NOT have jury trials. So no little old ladies get awarded a hundred million when their nose jobs go awry. But there is adequate enforcement of accountability in medical practice.
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There are certain pieces of medical equipment which cannot be exported outside of the US. Should doctors in India require these pieces of equipment for some ultramodern procedure, they may not be able to perform such procedures. I suppose this is what law makers and HMO execs would be chirping about when it comes around to this - Don't worry about these "low-level" jobs going offshore, we still have the "high-tech" stuff here to fill the niche!
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
There are US hospitals which send their MRI images electronically to Indian companies which have a 24/7 staff of radiologists to interpret the images and send back the results. It is supposedly cheaper and faster according to a television show I saw, can't recall the show, it may have been on Tech TV. I do believe medical regulatory boards consisting of US doctors are going to make decisions which benefit US doctors. If the outsourcing trend became a major threat, I believe US doctors would employ some type of regulatory action to justify halting the trend. Doctors have had positions of status and wealth in the US for a long time and I don't think they are going to allow that positions slip away without a hard fight.
4 "years" of Med school (typically 2-3x the work load of what most colleges will limit students)
3-6 "years" of residency (again working 80-130 hrs/week - one-two days off a month so it's equivalent to 10-15 years job experience)
Most surgeons I know work 80 hours/week(think of it as 2 jobs) and are on beeper call 24/7 to their patients, except on rare ocasions.
..........FULL STOP.
- mritunjai
Come on guy, get real! The few bucks they give out to entice people to give blood is hardly something that generates personal proffit. As a U.S. resident for the last 33 years I've yet to see these "baby stores" or "womb rentals" you speak of.
OK, there it is... I found it. He mentions something about ending special tax cuts for companies that outsource...
... "If other countries can do something cheaper we ought to let them do it, and concentrate on what we can do best."
but then again he also mentions about Bush providing too little in the form of homeland security, which is funny since I distinctly recall him screaming about how Bush is trying to make this all about homeland security and we need to not focus on that... Terrorism and security aren't the issue
Uh, but your own material says it is.
I can understand why he'd want it not to be the issue too. While he's carting around his "band of brothers" he was highly involved with war protests with the Vietnam Vets Against War and Jane Fonda. Many POW/MIA families are pissed at him for his time as the POW/MIA Chairman of the commitee on POW/MIA affairs. His behavior seemed to be more about normalization and less about saving any remaining POWs/MIAs. At the end of his term he simply declared that there were none left alive but didn't list nor look into how they died, who they were, where their remains are.
My point in all of this is, if one misrepresents (read: lies) so freely on one thing (esp something he makes such a big deal about), he'll likely lie on others, and deserves some closer looks.
But at least Kerry seems to read one part of his BS. OF COURSE Kerry screams about it daily. After that econimist's banter about outsourcing "in the long run *probably* being a good thing" with the Media and Dem leaders getting pissed and covering it. I don't think Kerry can do a thing to stop outsourcing, even with stopping the tax breaks.
The funny thing: Clinton's Labor Sec (Robert Reich) said the same aprox the same thing if not worse: "Outsourcing does not reduce the total number of jobs in America,"
Oh I forgot, this is slashdot, we love Clinton.
Ok, how is this: I am physics graduate student,
won't get PhD until I am 29 an until then I earn
less than 20K a year while working basically
every waking moment (about 14 hrs a day/ 7 days a
week). I will then be a postdoc for a few years
earning about 40K and then hopefully a professor
earning 70K or so. If all doctors worked as much as
I do and had pay schedules as low I do we'd have
more or less affordable healthcare.
I do not pay 100,000 year for insurance and I will not in the foreseable future, I will do general practice most likely. I stated some surgeons pay that much, you could add OB docs to that list. My insurance will be in the range of 10 to 20K per year when I am done.
The people in medicine whom make large sums of money are those than do procedures - dermatolgists, gastroenterologist (from colonoscopies and such), and surgeons for example.
Surgeons, whom this article is really about because they would be the ones affected by this, pay very large sums of money in insurance. In the 80's I am aware of some that made tons of money as you suggest. At present, I am not aware of any that regularly make $400K (Unless they exclusively serve the rich, which is a rarity). That is certainly not that norm. 200K is more like it, and that is gross. After insurance and paying for office stuff, that number shrinks quickly.
However, surgery has to among the hardest things a person can go into. The stress in enourmous, especially in residency. Lets just say,surgeons are not known for their great personalities and they put up with a lot shit from each other and their patients. The expectations placed on them by themselves and their patients is very high.
As far as quotas, I cannot comment, I'm not sure how or why they number of surgeons is what it is. I can say, though, the number of residency spots for surgery (as well as many other medical specialties) is greater than the spots that are filled every year. That is, there are many unfilled spots every year in the united states.
I might also suggest that it is limited because it does take quite a bit intelligence among other things to be a good physician. It was tough for me to get into a medical school at all and I virtually had all A's in college and had difficult majors - engineering and science.
If you want high quality doctors, you have to expect to pay for it. We have very high expectations (rightfully so) from our patients and weeding out those unwilling to work hard to be good and talented enough to do so, I believe, is part of ensuring good quality.
Anyway, most docs aren't out to rape their patients of money. Covering all our expenses is, well, expensive. If we did not we'd go broke. Pretty simple addition and subtraction to figure that out.
The legal recourse and patient health are intimately linked. If you have no ability to complain about bad service, you WILL be stuck with bad service.
You're woefully wrong when you talk about a lack of accredited facilities in India. I'm sorry to say, but it's apparent that you speak out of an unfound prejudice that discounts the quality of Indian medical institutions.
I've only recently returned from that country and how it is progressing. This Harvard Medical associated facility is just the first of many similarly affiliated facilites coming up all over the country. John Hopkins has associates in the Indian market too.. I just can't recall their names. And there may be so many more initiatives underway that I'm not even barely aware of.
Agreed that even all this infrastructure available today doesn't amount to much, but it's more that a step in the right direction for that country.
And more importantly, for those in developed countries that can't afford to pay the high-cost of private healthcare, India offers a teriffic option to get treatment at a fraction of that cost.
I'd consider your rant to be a typical one for clueless anticorporate types.
3 832 ) and general health degradation in the US caused insurance to experience losses.
HMO is a desperate (and failing) attempt to control skyrocketing medical costs. Traditional system includes the insurance company and doctors as separate entities with the doctor making any decisions they want and insurance just footing the bill.
Unfortunately, newer expensive treatments ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=96859&cid=828
So, they decided to hire their own doctors and put them through the cost-control through the approval of procedures.
Eventually many other non-HMO companies followed suit. They now need to approve certain medical procedures beforehand, otherwise the doctor is not getting reimbursed.
Even despite all of this crap, the costs for the customers (i.e., these who pay premiums for the healthcare) continue growing. Major cause: expensive drugs and more people requiring them permanently.
To the contrary to the popular belief, lawsuits are not he culprit of the major cost rise at the medical insurance level, but they greatly affect doctors themselves and their malpractice insurance causing many doctors to drop out of practice in certain litigious areas.
P.S. I used to contract at a small healthplan company.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov