Companies explore overseas healthcare :"Carl Garrett, a paper-mill technician in Leicester, N.C., is scheduled to travel Sept. 2 to New Delhi, where he will undergo two operations. Though American individuals have gone abroad for cheaper operations, Mr. Garrett is a pioneer of sorts.
He is a test case for his company, Blue Ridge Paper Products, Inc., in North Carolina, which is set to provide a health benefit plan that allows its employees and their dependents to obtain medical care overseas beginning in 2007. "It's brand-new and nobody's ever heard of going to India or even South Carolina for an operation, so it's all pretty foreign to people here," says Garrett. "It's a frontier." Garrett's medical care alone may save the company $50,000. And instead of winding up $20,000 in debt to have the operations in the US, he may now get up to $10,000 back as a share of the savings. He'll also get to see the Taj Mahal as part of a two-day tour before the surgery. His two operations could cost $100,000 in the US; they'll run about $20,000 in India.'Medical tourism' is morphing into 'global healthcare.'"
Makes a lot of sense - for patients and their employers ! Hopefully, this will cause US hospitals to come down to earth and start offering realistic pricing so that medical care becomes affordable once again for the average US citizen !
This may not only be appealing to the insured/insurer but also to the insurance. I can forsee insurance companies basing their premiums on the insured's agreeing to forgo "local care" for "global care". With the emergence of robotic surgery systems in fact the surgeon could be in Delhi and the patient in Des Moines.
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