Patients travel to India for care

"The Trucker" apparently liked what he read in the pro-India puffery below, but I'll offer, below, a few questions about details that the article suspiciously leaves out.

On Wed, 12 Jul 2006, The Trucker

Is there anything that India is not "poised" for?

according to Aljazeera.net. The news service says the

Hmmmm...yoga and mbuttage. That might feel good.

12 %, then, is the maximum. In some hospitals? What percentage of all have zero foreigners?

Last year, more than 150,000 patients, mostly from Europe and

150,000? I wonder how many hospital beds there are in the whole country?

One hospital near me in the USA has hundreds of beds, average patient stays of a few days. 150,000 sounds pretty dinky to me.

India also has inflation (see below) and it is running around 4-5% average. If that 30% increase per year in medical services begins to put pressure on available facilities, then inflation in those services may follow the great inflation in labor costs that have already been seen in IT work offshored into India in the last 1-3 years as that industry expanded.

Indian official statistics? In a special report recently done by The Economist, it was reported that a lot of official statistics in India are fudged. Might be part of their high level of indigenous corruption.

Well, what exactly does "largely" mean? 80%? 55%? 50%? 30%? I don't think it can mean "most." Could it mean more than half? If it were that big, wouldn't they use that word?

"state of the art equipment"? In all of the facilities? Some? Most? What fraction of all Indian doctors could be "top clbutt doctors"? Better than US or European? As good as?

Some of those procedures are the kinds of procedures that I would expect that there might be a need for follow-up work. So, does the person stay in India and get that follow-up, at additional service and per day housing costs? Or, do they come back to their home country for the minor services and just drive to and from home? Or, might they have to jet back to India? Maybe multiple times.

In recent years there have been efforts to grade service quality across the USA in hospitals and clinics, and some of this is on websites. I would be asking if there is comparable data, and is it honest (and free of fudging), about Indian hospital performance. There are detailed studies going back decades about mistakes made in our (US) health care system that have resulted in rests and what otherwise falls into a category called malpractice. I would be likely to look or at least try to determine what kind of reports exist in the Indian iatrogenic medical literature. A different body of medical literature is "outcomes" and I'd want to compare that from India with what is in the US medical literature. Or, at least have an overview from at least one or credible authority. After all, there are a significant number of recent reports of dissatisfaction among US buyers of IT services from India.

a liver transplant could cost $140,000 in Europe and double that in the

Is this the key phrase: "The good hospitals here..."? Then, there are bad hospitals there, too? Ahhhhh....then... how many are good, how many bad? Are the costs the same at both the good and bad? Anyone want to say, publically, which are which?

In

There are constant arguments about whether the state-govt systems are better or worse than private systems, but a recent study appearing in The Economist found that measured health care in the UK was cheaper than in the US, where health care inflation has varied roughly between the low double digets and the high single digets. What do you want? You might or might not get what you pay for.

$1 bil annually? Net or gross? 40 million jobs? $1,000 annually per 40 jobs? Is that an average annual salary of $25? Part-time? Seasonal?

Isn't it funny that there are apparently no comments from non-Indians in this piece apparently authored by a person with a non-Indian sounding name from an Irish website?

OK, let the UK UHS get thousands of its surgeons, nurses, etc. jobs. blown off. Collapse the medical support industry. Close a whole bunch of hospitals to get costs (and taxes) to go down. Of course the unemployed are not paying taxes into the system any more (so what would be the net on that?) Buy a bunch of Boeing or Airbus jets, add fuel, airport space at both ends, parking lots & fees in the UK (in the US, the health insurance industry collapses plus the health care staff all get laid off...saves the cost of health insurance, right?), Add more jets (expensive) to India (more petroleum). Note, this is not an extensive analysis.

But, it all sounds like a science-fiction Rube Goldberg story to me. Great for India, though. Great for Boeing and Airbus. "Come into my parlor" said the spider to the fly.