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."
What is an HMO? Isn't it a facet of the American private health care system? There are no HMOs in the country where I live (Canada).
Free curry on your 3rd bypass.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Not to knock the healing hands in India, but I just can't snicker at the thought of my HMO telling me that they've outsourced my hip replacement to the cousin of the guy who replaced my job as a programmer.
--- have you healed your church website?
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"
It didn't work so well for my friend Mr. McGregg, with a leg for an arm, and an arm for a leg.
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 -
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.
If you needed open heart surgery or a liver transplant, would you still go to India to do it because "it costs less money"?
Are doctors in India "certified" by the government? do they get inspected regularly for standards of practice?
I don't want to bash Indian doctors or criticise anyone's decision to valuate medical work purely based on its cost; I just feel the readers should be informed of the potential risks associated with getting major treatments done in other countries just because of financial reasons.
What if I pick a bad doctor and he messes me up or whatever? Who can I sue? In all likelihood hed be gone after I left.
If you disagree post, don't moderate.
Just yesterday a friend of mine with an degree in economics was talking about the push in that field to move much of the work offshore.
This applies to any profession - there is no "safe" field. Look at law - despite what television tells you, most people with law degrees aren't engaging in clever courtroom rhetoric all day, or even at all, but doing "back office" stuff. This, too, can be offshored in time.
I'm not saying that this is a good or a bad thing, or that I have any answers, but it *is* obvious that saying "just get a new career in accounting/law/marketing/whatever!" is naive because there is no strictly "safe" field to start with, and never will be.
While, as an Indian, I am flattered by your opinion, your argument is flawed. I think that the Indians you've met are good at the math and sciences because their parents pushed their children to become engineers.
Furthermore, almost every culture that has existed for thousands of years has had a few great scientists. Are the British inherently any smarter because Issac Newton was British, or the French any wiser because Pascal was French? Obviously not!
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.
Laws need to be passed to protect the people. These insurance companies are evil. We would be better off with a state run health insurance system than the hyena's that currently run the insurance companies.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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
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)
--
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.
Ya, I work 80 hours a week (legally that is, in reality I work much more than that but I'm technically limited to 80 hours per week), owe twice as much in student loans as the cost of my condo (condo about $82,000, you do the math) and make 40,000 a year. Sure I'm a resisdent still, but as a general practitioner I'll still work at least 60 hours a week, and oh ya, by the way, I won't be finished with training until I'm 30. I've sacrificed many of my hobbies and pleasures in life to do this. I spend much of my spare time reading to keep up with the lately studies. Do I complain about this? NO. Absolutely not, this is what I choose to do, but comments like this really get on my nerves.
Also, I have to wonder what the legal environment is like in India? How much do these docs pay for legal insurance. Since some surgeons in the US can pay over 100,000/yr in insurance, I would suspect that might account for much of the cost.
People in the US sell their blood for personal profit. Or their babies. Or hire out their wombs. Selling parts of yourself for financial gain isn't exclusive to India, or even the developing world in general: it happens in the developed world too.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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
Which airlines will carry a person,
who tells them - up-front - that
they have a heart or other serious
medical condition?
(And any insurance may not cover
them if they don't tell them...)
The real blame if something like this REALLY happens is the doctors themselves...
Here in Detroit, the costs of medical care are completely outrageous.
I have had the "opportunity" to have some relatively benign medical proceedures done and the costs of these proceedures was astronomical
Proceedure 1: Partial removal of ingrown toenail. $778.00
Proceedure 2: earwax removal: $190.00
I personally know that the ear-wax removal can be done for $50.00 at a place about an hour away. When you consider that the proceedure consists of the doctor looking in your ear (yep, there is a lot of wax in there), dumping a few drops of a chemical into your ear canal, telling you to lay on your side for 10 minutes (doctor leaves the room at this time to do something else), doctor returns after 10 minutes and squirts a lot of very cold water in your ear canal and the wax is now gone. Total time: 20 minutes.
It's no wonder that someone would consider it reasonable to send medical work off to india. With the amount of overcharging that is "the way things are done" here, it's only a matter of time before things get shaken up...
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
The problem is, India faces major food shortages right now. They can't wait for outsourcing to bring them the money they need. That is where my proposal comes in.
If we ship overfed American women to India, and then import the unfortunate, thin, and quite lovely Indian women back to the USA, we will finally have achieved social justice. Thank You.
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.
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.
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
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.
In my experience of working in three different countries, there are three kinds of people:
9 /10761751 05694.htmlo ries/2004021301210400.htm
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.
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.