Saturday, March 29, 2008

Medical Tourism: 92% Savings in India

NEW DELHI--The number of Americans heading abroad for medical procedures is surging as the country's 46 million people without health insurance look for treatment they can afford and cash-strapped U.S. companies struggle to find cheaper ways to provide high-quality medical care to their employees.

India is fast becoming the destination of choice for patients seeking complicated high-end procedures they can't afford or can't manage to schedule with a doctor they trust at home. These include things like heart surgery, organ transplants and orthopedic procedures like knee replacement or hip resurfacing (see price list above).

Several Fortune 500 companies and the West Virginia Legislature are among those considering bonuses — including first-class airfare and four-star hotel stays—for employees willing to undergo medical treatment abroad. And several major insurers already cover treatment programs in Mexico and Thailand.

(Via Taxing Tennessee)

3 Comments:

At 3/31/2008 10:25 AM, Blogger Seenivasan said...

India Rocks...!!!

 
At 4/09/2008 7:54 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Quite honestly, I cannot imagine going to some 3rd world country for surgery.

There is a lot more to think of than just hygiene and medical standards. What are the legal implications when something does go wrong? That's when you really want to be in the US or Western Europe.

A friend of mine needed a hip replacement and her insurance plan wouldn’t pay for it. So she went to Germany for surgery. It was only marginally more expensive than India, but they actually kept her in hospital for some 3 weeks to recover and have rehab every day.

That's something one will neither get in the US nor anywhere else.

 
At 4/13/2008 5:03 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you arrange for medical travel through a reputable medical tourism company like WorldMed Assist, the hospitals they partner with are very carefully screened. Most have undergone a rigorous accreditation process similar to the best U.S. hospitals. Often, their top surgeons were trained in the U.S., and many have affiliations with renowned US medical centers such as Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical. International health care also allows access to procedures not widely practiced in the US, such as Hip Resurfacing
--a better option for many patients than a hip replacement. Hip resurfacing was only approved by the FDA in 2006, so finding a skilled, experienced surgeon in the US is difficult.

 

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