Some frills might be useful when you're having heart surgery...
I'd gladly give up $200 aspirin, personally...
In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
101–110 of 116 posts
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you can hire an "SE" (and I use the quotes deliberately) for $15/day also; but you won't get much use out of her/him. Decent grads from a good school regularly get Rs 100K/month offers, from what I've been told (which works out to about $10/hr or so).
>but you won't get much use out of her/him. Wrong. Getting paid less doesn't mean the quality is always going to be bad. In this case getting paid less means, people don't have opportunities to begin with and are ready to do compromise with anything just to get the opportunity. When I started out here in India, I was paid 10,000 Rs per month at a call center. And I considered my self fortunate for even having a job.…
Getting paid less doesn't mean the quality is always going to be bad.
In most cases like this, you get what you paid for. More number of hours and not complaining doesnt mean quality. There might be cases like you, but frankly the chances are too less.
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. I'm looking for a flat to invest in and I am finding them out of reach, even after taking housing loan and they are running away from me a lot faster than I can catch up, besides, I've already started to pant :( (meaning the salary going to other holes in significant portions)
I visited China for a week. I felt China's inflation is horrible. Everything costs 1.5 to 3x more when compared to India.
wtf!! Dont attribute it to inflation, it is called "Cost of living index".
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#104I'd like to take a shot at answering this: why is a low cost medical treatment effective in India? 1. For the most part, medical education is good in India. In the better hospitals you will find that doctors are generally very smart and knowledgeable. They also happen to be very practical when suggesting treatments and do consider the treatment cost as a factor when suggesting options. 2. The cost of living in India…
I'm going to guess it's because people in India are allowed to practice medicine and produce equipment. If I were to start practicing medicine and producing equipment up here in Canada I'd be arrested in a heartbeat. (Unless I went through all the hoops, and I again have a hunch there's many more here than in India)
India is hugely bureaucratic and inefficient..
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have myself bought a home in Hyderabad...And I am convinced that that it is useless. Only if you sell the home, you can make it a worth while investment. That too, in the order of 10% which is probably same as mutual funds...Plz do total cost of ownership before buying.
Oh, you are in a trap. If you have taken a huge loan(>40 lacs) to for your apartment. Especially in India- Hyderabad or Bangalore doesn't matter. You are likely to spend the next 15 years worrying about EMI's.
Living in reality, People dont marry if You dont have a house. For most people it is ok to get a loan and buy a house if they wish to start a family.
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are India's drugs cheaper? Is their patent system different than in the US? Or does the government dictate the price drugs can be sold at?
It's both. The Indian supreme court recently rejected Novartis' patent on Glivec, because the formulation wasn't different enough to merit a new patent (I don't know enough to know whether that was the right decision; just pointing out that the patent situation is different). The Indian government also has pricing restrictions on ~350 drugs deemed "essential". On top of this, compared to the US, there's little to no…
Not true, there are huge marketing overheads in India. Drug Marketing in India is much more hidden, companies shower huge gifts and money to doctors to prescribe their drug. SO essentially companies cannot publicly declare this as marketing budget.
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you can hire an "SE" (and I use the quotes deliberately) for $15/day also; but you won't get much use out of her/him. Decent grads from a good school regularly get Rs 100K/month offers, from what I've been told (which works out to about $10/hr or so).
>but you won't get much use out of her/him. Wrong. Getting paid less doesn't mean the quality is always going to be bad. In this case getting paid less means, people don't have opportunities to begin with and are ready to do compromise with anything just to get the opportunity. When I started out here in India, I was paid 10,000 Rs per month at a call center. And I considered my self fortunate for even having a job.…
When I started out here in India, I was paid 10,000 Rs per month at a call center.
If it makes you feel any better, I started at Rs 1500 per month in a top IT firm.
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#108"Essentially we realised that as you do more numbers, your results get better and your cost goes down," Tis tempting to just think of this as a "low rent" version of the "real" procedures that are offered at much higher costs in the west, but there really is something to just doing enormous numbers of procedures when it comes to the brutal learning of human medicine. I would not be surprised to start seeing innovatio…
With 4 operations/day they will be the masters of heart surgery, but will they have the time to write scientific papers?
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#109I know some people who were operated at "Narayana Hrudayalaya".
One of my relative had received treatment there. Like any other news reports the $800 figure is a bit of exaggeration. The total cost of the surgery including travel, additional stay at hospital, pre and post-surgery treatment etc. costs around More power to NH.
Re: In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
#110Despite my cynicism, I too have had a positive experience with at least one Indian medical institute. Instead of using general anesthetic and an operating theater to work on my friend (which would have required several nights recovery in a hospital) they operated on him under local anesthetic in the dentist's chair. It wasn't pretty but it was a complete success. Other doctors had quoted me 60,000 rupees for the procedure ($1100 USD) but the whole thing was done for 10,000 rupees ($184 USD).
Working with people who live on the street, I cross paths with the medical profession here regularly. Some doctors have proven to be pretty apathetic, but the odd one, through the necessity of giving affordable health care to India's thronging poor, has proven to be truly innovative.
An account of discount surgery here: http://lostinmumbai.org/2013/03/11/9/ Some of the discount was good will but a lot was innovation and the ability to take risks through the absence of repercussions.