My adventures in medical tourism
chrisstucchio.com
My adventures in medical tourism
1–10 of 202 posts
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#2I am originally from India and came to the US 10 years ago. I still can't believe that you can not call up a doctor/clinic/hospital in US and get a price quote for something routine.
Chris's experience is representative of what one can expect from the Indian health care system. If you are a working, middle class person, the free market health care works extremely well.
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#3My wife had some complications after pregnancy. UK and Ireland has GP referral system, where single doctor coordinates all specialists. In theory it is good system. But our GP ignored basic symptoms and pushed bullshit like "depression" or "have you tried acupuncture?". We paid each GP visit, even for saying hi and collecting results, it was obvious GP was just pushing for more visits.
This was going on for several months.. Eventually we visited doctor in Athens, the whole thing was diagnosed and solved in weeks. Solution was $2 pill and routine surgery.
I really recommend to anyone with some 'mysterious' health issues to visit REAL doctors.
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#4I am originally from India and came to the US 10 years ago. I still can't believe that you can not call up a doctor/clinic/hospital in US and get a price quote for something routine. Chris's experience is representative of what one can expect from the Indian health care system. If you are a working, middle class person, the free market health care works extremely well.
Part of the problem is you can thank the stranglehold the AMA has around the US healthcare system to keep the number of doctors artificially low so their salaries remain ridiculously high.
Here's another example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-machine-...
"Anesthesiologists tried to stop Sedasys.
They lobbied against it for years, arguing no machine could possibly replicate their skills or handle an emergency if something went wrong. Putting someone to sleep is an art, they said. Too little sedation, and the patient feels pain. Too much, and the patient dies. Anesthesiology requires four years of training after medical school, meaning careers might not launch until the doctors are in their 30s. It’s one reason the profession’s median salary is $277,000 a year, according to research firm Payscale."
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#5I am originally from India and came to the US 10 years ago. I still can't believe that you can not call up a doctor/clinic/hospital in US and get a price quote for something routine. Chris's experience is representative of what one can expect from the Indian health care system. If you are a working, middle class person, the free market health care works extremely well.
Exactly. Imagine how much of a hassle car repairs would be if your car insurance company handled an oil change or a tire balance/rotation.
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#6My wife had some complications after pregnancy. UK and Ireland has GP referral system, where single doctor coordinates all specialists. In theory it is good system. But our GP ignored basic symptoms and pushed bullshit like "depression" or "have you tried acupuncture?". We paid each GP visit, even for saying hi and collecting results, it was obvious GP was just pushing for more visits. This was going on for several m…
Hold on, you paid for a GP in the UK? That's not how the system works....
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#7I am originally from India and came to the US 10 years ago. I still can't believe that you can not call up a doctor/clinic/hospital in US and get a price quote for something routine. Chris's experience is representative of what one can expect from the Indian health care system. If you are a working, middle class person, the free market health care works extremely well.
In addition to what itg said, another is that with various insurers the doctors and even the billing people do not actually know what you'll pay. They know what the service costs them to perform (irrelevant to what is charged to the consumer), they know what they're going to bill the insurer (a grossly inflated number that is a big cause of these massive 6-figure bills you see to uninsured folks), but they have no idea what the insurer will actually reimburse them, so they honestly can't tell you.
It's a broken system and there's no excuse for it, but at least in the US it is not because they're being intentionally obtuse.
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#8My wife had some complications after pregnancy. UK and Ireland has GP referral system, where single doctor coordinates all specialists. In theory it is good system. But our GP ignored basic symptoms and pushed bullshit like "depression" or "have you tried acupuncture?". We paid each GP visit, even for saying hi and collecting results, it was obvious GP was just pushing for more visits. This was going on for several m…
Hold on, you paid for a GP in the UK? That's not how the system works....
This was Ireland.
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#9Your treatment in the US would have involved something like 5 doctors, $100,000 billing (probably not payments since those things are only vaguely related) and 2+ years of your time.
Re: My adventures in medical tourism
#10I am originally from India and came to the US 10 years ago. I still can't believe that you can not call up a doctor/clinic/hospital in US and get a price quote for something routine. Chris's experience is representative of what one can expect from the Indian health care system. If you are a working, middle class person, the free market health care works extremely well.
>I still can't believe that you can not call up a doctor/clinic/hospital in US and get a price quote for something routine
You can. Routine, profitable procedures are not hard to arrange in the US. I have personally worked in a clinic where the exact experience described in this post happens every day.
>If you are a working, middle class person, the free market health care works extremely well.
It's pretty easy in most places in the world to get people to do something that makes them money, like the discectomy discussed here.
Managing a system where the poor and the unlucky get care is a little tougher. The US does it lousily, but so does most of the rest of the world. India doesn't do it at all.
edit:copy error