Medical Tourism And The Sad, Sad State Of American Healthcare

Nisha- perhaps the title of the BC post caused some confusion, but my article on the immorality of fighting UHC was in favor of the idea.

My stance on the subject has changed since, however. Having everyone insured is a great first step, but it's meaningless when the costs are absurd even with insurance. Single-payer government sponsored health care that can't deny patients care is the only reasonable solution.

Otherwise, the chronically ill in this country are either going to end up dead or in bankruptcy. The allergy medicine I've been using has kept me healthy for about 8 months- but my insurance knocks only 20 dollars off. So that's another 80 per month on top of premiums and my ridiculous deductible.

Insurance itself is not the answer. Health care should be treated like oxygen and any country who deems it a commodity and claims to be a free nation is hypocritical to the core.

FYI: There was a great Fast Company piece on Medical tourism last year http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/medical-leave.html

The problem with socialized health care is that it is built on the absurd notion that you have a "right" to someone's else labor. Funny, we used to call that slavery.

Medical students go into medicine for both selfish and altruistic reasons - because they enjoy their work, because they want to help people, because they're smart and they want to make a lot of money. All of those are perfectly wonderful reasons for choosing a profession.

Their product, health care, is valuable. It is only right that they have the right to choose when and to whom they sell it, and for what price. Or are you the kind of person who would just love it if the police came to your door and told you that you had to give away your car, at this price, to that bum on the street, rather than sell it to the wealthy banker who offered you $30,000 for it?

To force doctors to give their work to patients unable to pay for it is to turn them into slaves.

If we turn all our doctors into slaves, obligated at the threat of losing their jobs and licenses to wait for government approvals, fill out government paperwork, give patients treatments that judge not to be in their best interests, and refuse extra payment for excellent service, how appealing do you think the medical profession is going to look? Our health care shortage is going to get even shorter when doctors realize that they've been turned into the servant dogs of the nation.

Which brings us to the patient side of this whole fiasco. "Medical tourism", as you call it, is even more prevalent in countries with socialized medicine. How often have you heard of Canadians crossing the border to pay for private operations they can't get for months in their own country? When you take away every incentive for doctors to become doctors and you allow people to come into the emergency room for a cough or a cold with no consequence, demand increases and quality of care decreases, causing worse shortages and more problems than before.

In the name of “equal access” to health care, doctors under universal health care systems are often forbidden to provide essential care to patients outside of the system or prescribe unapproved but potentially life-saving drugs, and citizens are forbidden to spend their own money on medically necessary care for themselves or their loved ones. Governments use waiting lists to control costs, limiting the number of surgeries they will pay for in a given year, forcing people to trade, instead of their money, their time, which is sometimes much more valuable. When the difference is between debt and a dead child, do you think "we don't want you to go into debt" is going to sound COMPASSIONATE?

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that universal health insurance will fix our failing system. For one thing, many of the countries with socialized medicine, like Canada, are starting to re-privatize their health care, because it just doesn't work. But most importantly, it's cruel - it's cruel to treat doctors like we own their lives, like they have to serve us, and it's cruel to patients to put limits on what they can and can't buy with their hard-earned money, especially when those limits may be the lives and happiness of themselves and their loved ones.

US Insurance carriers are starting to cover procedures in other countries and contract with hospitals in other countries too. The quality is as good as the US and the costs are cheaper so it's better for the insurance company, too.

Medical tourism is emerging as one of the few times competition may lower prices in US health care. People believe they can get quality care for much lower price. If anything, this is getting hospitals and doctors to rethink their prices.

One of the dirty secrets in health care is no one really knows how much a procedure costs. The government fixes prices for some procedures, hospitals add in their overhead costs to the price of some procedures but no one really knows how much labor and materials go into a procedure. Hospital billing systems are set up to maximize insurance payments not product an itemized receipt.

Medical tourism is really a reflection of costs of the US health care and how they are unsustainable. Insurance is more about who pays for it.