It's not greed, it's a consequence of health insurance. Get rid of health insurance and prices would drop 10x.
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Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
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Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
What incentive is there in the USA to reduce healthcare costs? The system is totally corrupt.
I don't know much about the American healthcare system, but wouldn't it be the same incentive when selling any product? If you sell the same quality product for cheaper, you will get more business than your competitors. That's what competition in a free market is, no?
The US healthcare system is nothing close to a free market. Every step along the way is rigged: the schools that grant medical licenses is artificially gated, you require certifications you need political clout to obtain to open a medical facility, you need to have enough money to play ball with insurers so you get paid for operations, you need to comply with thousands of federal regulations surrounding your procedures, you need to get zoning permission from wherever you are trying to set up shop to even build a medical facility (note that local governments are easily bought out by the hospital chain in their area).
There is also an incredible amount of corruption surrounding drug prescription and diagnosis to get people buying way more drugs than they need to.
It isn't anything close to a free market. I could never open a health clinic out of my garage and put out a sign saying free anything related to medicine. By comparison, India has much more volatile healthcare (because they can't police everyone trying to play doctor) but get innovation as a result.
Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#33Medical tourism has hurt most Indians. 1583 USD is almost 100k INR. The average per capita income in India is 1219 USD (72k INR). This figure too is very misleading, since poverty is a huge problem. A very simple plotting with data from wikipedia and rudimentary extrapolation, shows that more than 1.1 billion Indian's annual income is less than the current cost of heart surgery. India's total population is 1.2 billio…
> Medical tourism, though very fine for a lot of folks who want a cheaper alternative, is driving up the cost of medical treatments in India by leaps and bounds.
Any evidence to back this up? Your links and statistics are about how this specific cost is still out of reach of a lot of people. I don't think anyone is debating that.
> This makes surgeries, that were already very expensive and out of the reach of most Indian's even more expensive and out of the reach of even more people.
The article shows how the cost of surgery has dropped over time, and their goal being to drop it further.
Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#34It's not greed, it's a consequence of health insurance. Get rid of health insurance and prices would drop 10x.
I think you don't understand the purpose of insurance.
Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#35It's not greed, it's a consequence of health insurance. Get rid of health insurance and prices would drop 10x.
Would they? Or would the poor middle class people not being able to afford cancer-treatment/heard surgery just have a considerably lower life-expectancy? I am not sure, so I really would love to see the numbers/facts supporting your statement. Would love to learn of this magic fact. [cynicism end] [Edit]: Typo [Edit 2:] In Germany, with full health-insurance the cost for a Cardiopulmonary bypass are round about 30k €…
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Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A doctor trained in India is no less qualified than a doctor trained in the US. In general? http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/shocking-facts-ab... > It’s also pretty staggering that hiring qualified staff doesn’t appear to increase this probability. Das and colleagues suggest that part of the issue might be the variation in the quality of instruction in Indian medical training institutions. So there may be…
I read about this clinic somewhere else, and there it was said this clinic actually outperforms western clinics in terms of complications, which seems to be achieved through staggering case numbers per doctor.
That makes sense: experience increases performance, which is why we have intensive residencies; there is a reason why until recently residents were working 80+ hours a week. Perhaps we should ship all our resident-ready medical students off to third world countries where the needs are great so they can become proficient very quickly. Perhaps our system has become too soft.
Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#37I'm just curious to know the situation in countries like Russia and China, because many of my friends took their medical degree from those Countries. Is is just the education is cheaper or entire industry?
Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#38It's not greed, it's a consequence of health insurance. Get rid of health insurance and prices would drop 10x.
If everyone had health insurance, and charity care that the hospitals currently eat the costs for now went away, then health insurance prices will drop.
That is the whole point of the mandate.
Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#39It's not greed, it's a consequence of health insurance. Get rid of health insurance and prices would drop 10x.
Would they? Or would the poor middle class people not being able to afford cancer-treatment/heard surgery just have a considerably lower life-expectancy? I am not sure, so I really would love to see the numbers/facts supporting your statement. Would love to learn of this magic fact. [cynicism end] [Edit]: Typo [Edit 2:] In Germany, with full health-insurance the cost for a Cardiopulmonary bypass are round about 30k €…
First of all, I am sure the 106K figure is a phony 'list price' figure and not reflective of how much is actually paid.
Second of all, you ignore the incredible sums of money taken from the 'poor middle class' and handed over to the health industrial complex.
For most of this country's history [the USA], there was no such thing as health insurance. The poor got charity care and the middle class were able to pay.
Why do you think cancer treatment has to be expensive?
Re: Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A doctor trained in India is no less qualified than a doctor trained in the US. In general? http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/shocking-facts-ab... > It’s also pretty staggering that hiring qualified staff doesn’t appear to increase this probability. Das and colleagues suggest that part of the issue might be the variation in the quality of instruction in Indian medical training institutions. So there may be…
That article doesn't actually compare India to the US. In fact, it says that "It’s also likely the results aren’t India-specific." It would be interesting to see the results of a similar study carried out in the US or UK, for example. In any case, there is a difference between the general level of competency of doctors in a given country, and the level of competency available to wealthy foreigners travelling to the c…
It's not India-specific. This is definitely happening in Eastern European countries, too, and probably even some of the western ones (although a bit more) - just like with college tuitions.
There's something seriously wrong with both the healthcare system and the education system in US if the prices are 20x+ more than in any other country.