Medical Tourism

Today there are over 45 million people without any type of health care in the United States. At nearly $700 per month for the average family, many cannot afford health insurance,

There are two factors that make the highest contribution to the unnecessarily high costs in the health industry: doctors’ wages and high malpractice insurance costs. The primary element is high cost labor. The annual salary for a general surgeon in USA is from 249,700 to 336,000, while average salary for a physician in India is $120.000 per year. Second, malpractice premiums are skyrocketing in the US; it has increased over 134.5% between 2000 and 2004. In other countries malpractice is nearly negligible since there are either laws that forbid malpractice law suits or there are limits to the amount that a patient can receive from a malpractice suit.

The solution to for providing affordable health insurance to Americans is reducing the amount of money that the insurance companies pay out to medical providers. This can be done by outsourcing certain medical procedures to developing countries such as Thailand, India, and the Philippines that have lower labor and malpractice insurance costs. Traveling to another country for medical procedures is nor a new phenomenon; Americans have been doing it for years. Now that the vast majority of foreign hospitals catering to American patients are becoming accredited by JCHO, the same organization that accredits American hospitals, the opportunity to save billions of dollars should be quite enticing to insurance companies and the ability to once again afford insurance companies and the ability to once again afford insurance should be encouraging to Floridians. For example, a hip replacement in the US costs about $100,000. In India, the procedure, airfare, hotel stay, and a vacation afterward costs about $10,000; that’s a country by those patients could be encouraged by legislation that would the patient 20% of the cost saving; in the hip replacement example, the patient would receive a check for $18,000 from his or her insurance company. Beyond cost savings, the patient may receive better care. In India, the patient to doctor ratio in hospitals catering to Americans is 5 to 1; that is far better than in the Untied States.