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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."
I hate to admit it, but they do have a point. Savings can be had by lower paying doctors, nurses, facility costs, you also get to eliminate malpractice suits. Real savings with the last one. Your real cost will be to ship the patient back and forth (around $800 to $1200).
Hmm, Im torn between feeling bad for doctors/nurses, and happy that there will be less need for lawyers.
later,
epic
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
This is in stark contrast to the jerk who 'helped' me in SF. "Yeah, drink a lot of water. That'll be $400"
So you go to Bombay to get a kidney
removed and they remove the healthy one.
Can you sue them for malpractice a-la US?
I'm afraid not.
I read that some HMO's are sending xrays
and cat-scans to india for diagnosis via
internet.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
After spending any time in India (for medical treatment especially), this is a must.
If you disagree post, don't moderate.
all parents tell they children that when they'll grow up they'll be doctors. Of course they say that thinking about how a doctor can make and not on how important and honorable (at least it was) to be a doctor.
... give me a break ... Some people study during all their lifes and don't make the money some surgeons make in a couple of days.
Several Med. freshman are not worried about saving lives and helping people, just to get out of the hospital with a Mercedez in the way to their house in the beach. Sometime they say that it is expensive because they had to study for 10 years to be a doctor
Some concepts must be reviwed.
90% of the physical products you buy will be built in China, and possibly designed there too.
90% of the services you use will be provided by India.
It's ironic that the West leads in one main field, namely agriculture, which should have been outsourced a long time ago were it not for the farming lobbies.
There is no moral to this story except that everything you use and buy - except food - will get cheaper and cheaper.
I personally welcome this. Maybe it's because of the bad taste left in my mouth by seeing the local orthodontist brag about how he only worked a couple hours a week, right before he jumped into his multi-million dollar Mitsubishi turbo-prop. My mom just paid several thousand dollars to have a root canal/tooth cap.
Perhaps it's not the best bet for open heart, but for some of the more insanely priced operations like that I think it make senses.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
This is more a problem of OUR system, than anything better about theirs. I've got a cheaper solution: Build a Cruise-Ship/Hospital and park it 4+ miles offshore, offer first class medical help without all the US bullshit... you could cruise up and down the shore and hit more locations.
meh
I think that the Indians you've met are good at the math and sciences because their parents pushed their children to become engineers.
You're partially wrong. The other part of the reason is that Indian primary schools are real schools, not the socialized babysitting locations America has. If you measure a child from America who's been homeschooled (or was lucky enough to go to a _real_ school) against an Indian child who went to random primary school X, they'd probably be about the same.
The real irony of all this is that costs us (Americans) more to have the socialized babysitting centers than it would to have real schools.
Of course, when you see an Indian student at a University studying to be an engineer, it's no mistake that he's there. Smart people get to go to college*. You never meet the stupid ones.
[*] Rich people get to go to college too, but they go into business school.
Hmmmm....have to agree....HMOs are really just an American thing.
The National Health Service in Britain(mentioned in the article) isn't an HMO - it's a...err...national health service.... you know...the idea that people without private health insurance have a right to treament.....
Mind you, I'm Irish....so what we have doesn't even pass for a health service (HMO, nationalised or otherwise!) - in Ireland you won't be refused entry to a hospital based on your insurance plan...so you have the comfort of expiring on a trolley in some hallway after waiting six days for an examination!
(Bombay is Mumbai? So is Bombay an archaic usage(like Bangkok is for the capital of Thailand) or is it just an Anglicised version of the word?)
Concrete analysis...
Medical Tourists.
It's official, we live in a wierd science fictional dystopian society. "Medical tourists", It sounds like a term akin to "Organ Leggers" from Niven's Known Space. Go back, oh, 20 years and speak the term "Medical Tourist" and people wouldv'e given you blank stares. Not to long from now they will say, "Had my hip done in India, and my plastic surgery in Mexico."
Since we live in a sci-fi world, I can't wait to get fitted for my one piece jumpsuit, and eating my soma infused soylent big brother.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
People are already being shipped abroad (not to india, but france the netherlands etc.) in Britain for treatment because the NHS cannot cope with the number of patients on the waiting lists. Also some are travelling to countries like Poland for cheap cosmetic surgery.
Operations can and do go wrong and its not much good if your surgion is half way around the world when you get rushed into hospital. Also hospitals do plan for readmittance, which obviously they cannot do unless you are treated by them.
Also I'm sure I don't need to spell out the problems that will be encountered if the patient needs ongoing treatment.
In the UK when private operations go wrong the patient often gets dumped on the National Health Service.
P.S. If you want my opinion, the US could do a lot worse than get itself a National Health Service. Access to healthcare should not be based on the ability to pay or what is covered on your insurance policy (if you can afford one.)
Philip
Signatures are broken
I have a question that may look like a troll, but I'd like some real thoughts. I assume that hospital visits, operations, etc cost so much because of how much the hospitals must pay for their equipment. So, are there any ideas why hospital equipment costs so much? I thought I heard MRI's run in the hundreds of thousands. Heck, Maine has a mobile MRI bus.
But even with this taken into consideration, hospital visits that don't touch any expensive machines are still very expensive. Is this to lower the cost of visits that do use expensive equipment? I still think this is explanation is on shaky ground as a $500,000 MRI might be used several thousand times. Does it really cost that much more for upkeep?
Thanks for any info on this matter. It just doesn't seem correct.
"Constantinople" was like 600 years ago. Try to send a letter to NY by addressing it to "New Amsterdam" and see if it goes there or not !
Beleive me, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and other East Europeans countries have much better dentinst then States. The quality of work is excellent (once American materials became available). Don't forget that these dentists are trained as full MD first and then spend three years specializing in dentistry.
If you're a techie and worried about what outsourcing may do to your career consider technical marketing or becoming a sales engineer. Good sales people make several hundred thousand dollars a year selling technology, and that role is not going to get outsourced (even if the product is). I would have to believe that the sometimes-low craft of selling is quite learnable and an engineer turned sales engineer turned sales guy will be a more credible voice for the technology as a technically weak smooth sales guy would be. My 0.02 etc. peace!
My mom goes down to Nicaragua pretty regularly with a civic group...the last trip she had a filling replaced by a dentist down there. She said it was the most pleasant dental visit of her life, and it cost $25...so it's not just India where things are going to be exported to.
They determine where you can/cannot go for your healthcare needs, much like any HMO in the US.
that is so wrong.
I have a broken leg, I walk into any hospital and they fix it.
I need treatment for cancer, they send me to one of the hospitals which specialize in oncology, oh and I have a say in which one (an aunt just went through this, she was involved in the decision and what doctors she saw.)
The "waiting lists" that the US Republicans like to spout aren't nearly as draconian as they would have you believe. If you're dying, you get in. If it's an operation on a hangnail, then you're in another line.
Canada's life expectancy is higher than that of the US which lacks universal health care.
You're just spewing Republican health care rhetoric.
But the liberals will never allow caps on malpractice suits. Republicans, insurance and doctors groups wanted to impose a cap but the Democrats and trial lawyers groups opposed them. I believe they had a show down in Florida last year.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
The worst thing that can happen is that you die. the hospital board circles the wagons and refuse to share any information regarding what went wrong, and trust me something went wrong.
Now this can happen at any hospital located anywhere in the world and while the money from a lawsuit is never worth the price, stripping the doctors of all their material possecions and throwing them and their families to the street would give me some saisfaction, unfortunately the legal system here in India is a little odd. the odds of the truth ever coming out are minimal.
guess im venting here, forgive me, lost a close relative recently, what makes it worse was that it was supposed to be an innocuos procedure that got bungled by negligence.
In my experience of working in three different countries, there are three kinds of people:
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1. People who work very hard and are heads and shoulders above others in productivity. There are very few such people.
2. People who work hard and are productive.
3. People who are seat-warmers. According to something I read yesterday, perhaps at slashdot, 71% of American workforce is like that, but I don't believe it.
The above three kinds of people exist everywhere, irrespective of the country.
That India didn't build up an infrastructure has nothing to do with lack of work or otherwise of Indians. It has something to do with bottled-up economy, the license-permit regime and several other factors. Now that this regime is in the process of being dismantled, infrastructure is being built rapidly.
* See, for example, http://surajsphotos.fotopic.net/ for images of new roads and buildings being built in India.
* Go to www.nhai.org, the website of National Highways authority of India to look at other projects.
* Go to http://www.delhimetrorail.com/home/index.htm, to see how the Delhi Metro Rail project has made strides in the past years.
* Here is some more about building of infrastructure in India:
- AMP to raise $129m for India fund venture
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/0
- http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/02/13/st
New Delhi , Feb. 12
THE country is poised for a grey revolution with the construction sector entering a boom phase to meet the demand for new highways, ports and real estate, according to the Union Commerce and Industry Minister, Mr Arun Jaitley.
----
If you are interested, I can give you more news about the boom in infrastructure development in India.
If Indians weren't hard-working, why would this be occurring?
If you pedal a bicycle rickshaw throughout a hot, dusty day ferrying passengers for a few cents, aren't you working hard?
If you work in fields, sowing and harvesting while the temperatures rise to 50 degree celsius, isn't that hard work?
If you hawk your wares on a bicycle or a cart amidst dense traffic, immense noise for a life time, isn't that hard work?
If you sit by roadside breaking stones with primitive pickaxes day after day, isn't that hard work?
And this is not specific to India, most developing countries have such work, and most developed countries too have the equivalent. Most humans are hard working.
The US spends roughly 15% of GDP on healthcare, while the rest of the first world spends roughly 10%. Docs in the US get paid roughly twice what their counterparts are paid in the rest of the first world. The average doc in the US makes $150k+ per year - after malpractice premiums. In general, malpractice is not a big expense, except for OBs and neurosurgeons.
For this, we get medical outcomes that are not demonstrably better than those in other first world countries. In fact, our outcomes are probably worse: in terms of life expectancy, we're 48th in the world, roughly the same as Cuba. That's sad, considering that our per capita healthcare spending is greater than Cuba's entire per-capita GDP.
Freedom will help but that's not the cause of prosperity (at all times). The US Constitution is not as "free" as you might think. Don't forget that women and non-whites were subordinates; don't forget that elites (similar to aristocrats) controlled everything early on (the vast majority of the Founding Fathers were extremely wealthy elites); many freedoms (such as freedom of the press) did not exist back then (at least in the form that it does now); and so forth.
So freedom is not the answer to US prosperity. Instead, there are three reasons in my opinion:
Freedom would make little difference to some of these countries. Don't get me wrong: I FULLY support granting greater freedoms. However, people in countries like India are already somewhat free. It is a kleptocracy but it isn't a dictatorship or totalitarian.
You can keep believing that capitalism is the path to freedom. But just know this: the day will come when your naive beliefs will fall apart. You will become a corporate slave under capitalism. Maybe you already are one...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
...whilst millions go begging for health care in India, wealthy foreigners can buy first calss care.
The same thing is happening in Australia.
Whiltst many young Australians miss a chance at a tertiary education every year, wealthy foreigners can buy a place in a degree course. Lower standards for fee paying students extend to 'no fail' policies.
It is scandalous but still the government of the day sails on...
It's probably not well known that people of Indian origin have a predisposition to heart problems. Last year on ABC's, Foreign correspondent, Domonique Schwartz did a story on Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, Cardiologist/Heart surgeon, of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital in Bangalore.
In a country with such a distorted wealth distribution, telemedicine allows outlying areas to access to access western trained cardiac specialists to supply top level care that was not previously possible.
Do not dismiss the expertise of these professionals. The products of top western hospital training in the UK, Australia and US, their expertise tempered by the shere number of operations they perform. The most salient point to consider is ....
- A government hospital run by the government of India, about 85 to 90 percent of their budgetary allocation goes for salaries. In the Western countries, about 60 to 70 percent of the yearly expense goes for the salaries. In our hospital, it's 20 percent or 22 percent.
[Foreign Correspondent, ABC, India a big Heart, aired: 18/02/2003]peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
he goes yelling 'CASTE'!!
sigh. wake up people. how many of you have been ever out of your own backyard?
India made caste system illegal as soon as it got independence. About the time when you were lynching blacks with abandon.
And oh, the other day I heard on radio about a jury sternly reprimanding a police officer that he should not be treating blacks like animals.
Says something about the caste system in america, dont you think?
Fase it, you have castes too - I think you guys call the different ones by names such as whites, blacks (ni**ers, is another name I heard?), spics, gooks, chinks, curries, patels, gandhis, injuns.. every single race that came to this country has been given an official caste name by you guys.
So, POT, stop calling the kettle black. atleast the kettle is trying to wash itself. OKAY??
Yeah, but you miss the very concept of reservation.
Indian schools have a category for people who have been supposedly been deprived of the facilities owing to their caste in the past. Hence there is the concept of reservation -- one where you are admitted if you belong to a supposedly lower caste merely because in the past your ancestors were discriminated against.
These are called Scheduled Castes & Tribes and other backward communities.
Now, tonnes of people in medical schools have far less than what it takes to legitimately get into medical school, and pass out of one. So, if you belong to whats construed as a "backward community", you are allowed to slack off, and thats a trump card that many use to get through school even though they do not deserve to be there.
Tell me honestly, would you really like someone with inferior skills who passed out owing to his race of birth was allowed to pass out to work on you? I would not.
And yeah, all the rich and the famous in India including the politicians themselves do not trust Indian medicos -- they goto US or UK (or Europe) for treatment. That in itself would say a lot.
Not in my life would I trust my life with an Indian doctor. No sir.