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Wealthy Americans Turning To Europe For Medical Treatment
theodp writes "Fox Sports' Jay Glazer reports that prior to undergoing recent neck surgery, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning flew to Europe for stem-cell therapy that's used overseas but not yet in the United States. Earlier this year, Fortune reported that prior to his liver transplant, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took an unpublicized flight to Switzerland to undergo an unusual radiological treatment which was not available in the U.S. Some Americans are willing to go abroad to seek what they can't find at home in hopes of improving — or saving — their lives, and health providers are eager to respond. 'It moves fast, this industry,' said the director of Medical Tours International in 2007. 'They think, 'Look at all these sick, rich patients.''"
Could this have anything to do with dodging anti-science policies of the American far right?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
maybe because most other countries in the modern world don't have a large rabidly religious and anti-science segment of their populations.
This can't be true. We have the best health care system on earth! I heard it on Fox News, so it must be true.
The US market produces a superiour health system doesn't it?
Or maybe it's what you get with a health-care system that's more about money than health...
Does this mean that health-care is a euphemism like health-and-safety?
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Could this have anything to do with dodging anti-science policies of the American far right?
I know it's fun to jump on the scientifically inept politicians but I might also cite general concern for what a stem cell treatment entails. Several medical professionals have explained to me that just randomly injecting stem cells into your body has unknown effects depending on the stem cells and the localization of the injection. This causes a variance of anything from magically cured to cancer-like growths. Stem cells aren't very well understood yet ... and some of that is to blame on halting embryonic stem cell research but even the Republicans are okay with non-embryonic stem cells. As we develop more ways to get stem cells, their hobbling of the US medical field becomes moot (assuming adult stem cells are just as awesome as embryonic stem cells -- something I don't know).
... are you cured yet? Oh, you died? Well, send in the next medical tourist!" Why doesn't the article explain what "procedure" or "treatment" Tonya Winchester was administered in Russia?
So, yeah, you know the FDA and other regulators are pretty slow moving to approve all this in the United States until that becomes more science than "Let's see, you take the syringe here and inject this shit there and
My work here is dung.
Let's see.
Middle income Americans go to Canada for their pharmaceuticals.
Thousands of US patients of all types go to Mexico and points south for all sorts of surgeries that aren't (yet, or ever) available in the US.
This story points to wealthy Americans going elsewhere for not-yet-approved 'edgy' radiological treatments, or stem cell therapies not practiced here.
Some on the left are going to see only that last one, and once again blame Bush for crippling US stem cell research. The fact is that is only seeing a single symptom of a more chronic condition: when you have a system crippled by politics and paralyzed by excessive litigation. when ideas, procedures, and research is circumscribed not by practicality or technology, but by policy set by science-illiterate representatives voted into their positions by a science-ignorant public for decades...well, what did we expect?
Clearly, some Americans are choosing with their WALLETS that value is more important than litiginous recourse - if you're buying a cut-rate surgery in Mexico, you're not really scrutinizing their malpractice coverage. If you're buying your heart medication from some website *.ca, FDA approval is clearly not your primary concern.
Don't get me wrong; anyone conversant with US history will recognize the consistency here. The US has always has a population that is non-intellectual, I believe even de Tocqueville commented on that in 1830. But like so many things in American popular culture, it seems the currents have somehow lately surged to tidal waves that threaten to swamp the whole boat.
Then again, that could just be me shouting "get off my lawn" like so many generations before ...
-Styopa
Although European countries have very different systems, they rather each have a health system whereas the US have a health industry. It shouldn't be surprising that one has better medical results and the other one better financial results...
So what's the point of this?
Some treatments are simply more available in certain countries.
No, I'm not defending America's approach to healthcare, but I've seen the same bloody argument used from the other side for all the America-bound medical tourism from rich Canadians and Euros, and in the end it means absolutely nothing. Rich people travel a lot. Rich people min/max their medicine.
The problem is for people who don't have insurances and can't pay for traveling outside their nation.
Fortunately, Mexico is quite close and can be visited cheaply, especially if you live in Texas or another close state.
I've got some friends who went down their for major dental work (nothing controversial or unavailable here) and paid a small fraction of what they were quoted in the US.
Thank the Food and Drug administration for this. We had stories on /. about this before.
Government money in health care and insurance is the reason why these are so expensive now, when technology should have made all of the health care much cheaper (unlike many people believe, technology increases efficiencies and makes things less expensive, not more. Think about imaging methods that replaced exploratory surgeries. Think how many more patients a single surgeon can see today. Think cancer treatments done with drugs or machines, that would have required surgery. etc.etc. Increase in technology makes products cheaper, not more expensive).
But not only does FDA hurt you financially, they are a major reason for various techniques not getting timely approval, so again, as an example an abortion pill that was used for decades in Europe made it into USA decades later.
Of-course from my POV, FDA is just another government agency, standing in between you and your freedoms and liberties. Figuring out the safety of medical procedures is one thing, and it should be done privately too, by private competing certification agencies. Figuring out the efficacy should be left to the market because the market will do so much quicker and at a very low expense, when compared to the clinical trials that may last for decades and waste hundreds of millions of dollars to run them.
You can't handle the truth.
Sounds more like wealth care than health care to me.
It's an important distinction to make. People come to the US for the quality, and people from the US go elsewhere for availability, usually in desperation.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Mohandas Gandhi
Jesus Himself does in many ways seem like a positive example; people following the obnoxious behavior of the Old Testament God seems to be the issue IMHO. Christians not partaking of such behavior is good, but in some ways they seem to be glossing over that issue in the Book.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
This isn't going to be pretty when the "We're Number One!" and "USA! USA! USA!" crowd gets here.
Medical treatment varies greatly from disease to disease, from country to country.
If you're looking for a general overview of the quality of care in a country, look at the survival rates of the widespread ones within a group.
For example, if judging cancer survival, you might look at prostate, breast, colon, and rectal.
"The highest survival rates were found in the U.S. for breast and prostate cancer, in Japan for colon and rectal cancers in men, and in France for colon and rectal cancers in women, Coleman's team reports."
I like your .sig --- literally true when t is time
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Be sure to tell anyone who talks like a pirate today that they are a faggot.
You fool - I just tried it and now I've been keelhauled.
These therapies are available, but there aren't that many patients. Not enough to support dispensing the therapies many places in the world.
The US doesn't have to offer every single medical treatment. Not when so many are targeted at so few patients. Not when our medical system isn't properly organized or financed to deliver even basic medical services to nearly everyone in the country first. Basic care for practically everyone is a higher priority than the most exotic care for a few.
The US does deliver that exotic treatment of rare diseases, often uniquely in the world, in vast overproportion to our population or even our weighted socioeconomic status in the world. There's plenty of unusual therapies for other countries to be the only ones to offer.
If we're worried that strategic medical innovation is happening elsewhere, we should simply do what those other countries do in a world they share with the US: piggyback on the basic research and early practice when therapies are new, to commodify them to serve lots more people more cheaply, safely and effectively.
That's how medicine works when it's primarily a service, not primarily a profitable business. The profit is retained, but not at the expense of the majority of the people's needs.
--
make install -not war
Doesn't every politician especially from the GOP say that the American Healthcare system and its actual care are the "best" in the world?
By the way, this is despite the fact that various metrics indicate the USA is no where near the top!
Is one of the major reasons I'm never going back. The last time I went (which will be the last time, period) my son caught a cold and was turned away from three hospitals because we didn't have the right type of insurance. I guess I shouldn't say turned away, I should say they all told me that because I didn't have the right type of insurance and I didn't have the an appointment I would have to go to the ER, which would easily cost thousands of dollars. Here in Japan my son would have been seen immediately, for free, wherever we went. Our medical system isn't socialized either, so don't even try that argument.
Shortly after that my wife had some allergy related breathing issues and we went to a hospital that did accept the insurance we had to get medicine. They diagnosed her with a degenerative lung disorder and ordered up all sorts of tests. Even with the insurance everything cost over $2,000 and guess what - it wasn't a degenerative lung disorder but rather a simple allergy attack like we thought in the beginning. On top of that we found every hospital we went to seemed dirty, was staffed with doctors and nurses who didn't seem to give a shit, and were constantly asked the same questions over and over as if the staff didn't bother to even look at the papers the previous person had filled out. I'm not just talking about one hospital either, all of them we went to were like this.
So yeah, rich Americans go overseas for medical care? Wow, big surprise there.
No, they are services. You cannot quantify health. In fact you have a hard time even defining health. And no, it's not "the absence of disease".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You know, having lived here for awhile, I can strongly recommend some excellent hospitals in Thailand. They are accredited by some American hospital organizations and I've personally used them for the some semi-serious conditions (knee-surgery) as well as very frequent monitoring of some chronic ailments (I'm a hypochondriac!).
It's actually somewhat amazing as to the quality you get for the price. I stayed in a state-of-the-art brand new private hospital suite (with comfortable sitting area for guests, kitchenette, private bath, big screen television, remote controlled curtains, etc.) for less than the cost of one of the five star hotels. The surgery (from what I can tell state-of-the-art laproscopy) was not that cheap (still less than $5K for everything) included everything including recovery and physical therapy. Also, the cute Thai nurses were very pleasant to be around!
Can't say all S.E. Asian countries are like this (there are some I'd stay far away from) but it's a great value for the money (they've got a great executive checkup that includes just about everything; blood tests, stress tests, chest X-rays, ECG, ultrasound, eye and ear tests, meeting with dietitian, etc.) for $250!. I wish that Medicare would pay for some of this stuff, it would save American taxpayers a ton of money (saving much more than transportation costs) while bringing down prices at home.
By the way, the geeks amongst us might enjoy the fact that EVERYTHING is digital at these hospitals and for a small fee (about $8) every report, image, x-ray, ultrasound, endoscopy, MRI, ECG, EKG, video from every visit you've ever had is put onto a CD-ROM for you. I've got quite a collection on my iPad!
Of course it is, but that little fact isn't going to stop the people who want socialized medicine in the US from using this article as a strawman to attack US health care.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
You actually took your son to a hospital because he caught a cold? You have to be joking, right? Look, I'm a die hard social libertarian who sincerely believes that the founders understood that you can not have liberty without life, and you can not pursue happiness without liberty. But to waste the time of professionals on something as so ludicrous as suffering a runny nose is really absurd.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Rich patients fly to other countries to have exotic, untested, unproven procedures that have little to no chance of saving their lives. There's nothing new here. To somehow say that this behavior has something to do with the hobbling of medical science by the government (Which is a very real concern on its own) is just silly. The 2 subjects are unrelated.
The historical record is unclear on this point *at best*.
Actually, the historical record of the time is pretty thin on Christ existing at all.
The common cold is not strep throat. They are two entirely different diseases. A cold is caused by viruses and there is no medical treatment on this planet, in any hospital anywhere, that can do anything to help. Strep throat is a bacterial infection. Idiot anti-science morons...it's people like you who go to the hospital and scream until you get prescribed something, anything, regardless of how it affects antibiotic resistance in the rest of the population.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
the over-regulation of the left that causes approval of things like stem-cell treatments, etc, to take forever.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Are you actually claiming that all's well in U.S. health care?
That's why he was surprised to be referred to the ER rather than to an associated walk-in clinic. That's sadly common in the U.S. when you have no insurance or the "wrong" insurance. You go to the busy and crowded ER where they HAVE to see you rather than to a much more appropriate clinic where they are not under that obligation.