The "India Travel Medicine" joke....was: Patients travel to India for care

Farther down is a "brag piece" posted recently and meant to attract outsiders to India for medical care only because it is cheaper. Some months ago, "indiaBPOking" authored a puff post with a similar theme and I added, at that time, a further analysis that included many factors that are important and could invalidate the "India is better because it cheaper" argument. Here is a short review of these factors.

Since some 80% of US people are covered by health plans, comparing Indian prices with full list price fees in the USA is invalid. US health plans include traditional insurances (with deductables, co-pays far far below full list prices, and limited benefits and often subsidized by the employer and quite a few retirees have subsidized health plans), Medicaid (free for poor people, and with low or no fees at all to the client) and may be available to the unemployed, and Medicare (for all people over 65, and also with generally low to very low fees), and, now, a generous national prescription drug plan. And, with a substantial fraction of hospital treatment, for poor people (and in many cases even for illegal aliens), already covered for free in the US starting with the emergency room? Are you going to go to India, which would likely be "out of network" for all of these plans? Would you rather be in a local hospital where, if you have a longer stay, your friends can come by anytime for a visit? One round trip between the US and India going to include at least two long plane flights, travel arrangements, airport waits, bagage and search hbuttles, paperwork that will add 2-4 days to the total time any proceedure will take. I don't know about the UK, but for a lot of people I know in the USA, "India Travel Medicine" (ITM) is not going to draw a lot of people out of the woodwork. Will US insurance companies dump US facilities for Indian facilities? I'm sure some will try. Years down the road we may see how this works out, but for the moment its a pipe dream with many practical and peripheral factors that do not validate the ITM proposal as a "better way"

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On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Straydog