You know your healthcare system has a problem when your insurance company starts offering to fly you halfway across the world for medical care.
Indiana-based health insurer WellPoint, Inc. has begun testing a program that allows patients to undergo elective surgeries in India instead of the US.
The program is currently available only to employees of a Wisconsin-based printing company whose employees WellPoint insures. And even though flights cost roughly $2,000 per person, round trip (according to Orbitz), it’s still more cost-effective for WellPoint to send patients to India than it is to airlift them down to Milwaukee. Want your knee fixed up? Knee surgery typically costs $70,000-80,000 in the US; in India, it’s a tenth that price.
Even more incredible is the fact that, at least according to the insurers, patients are actually more likely to receive high-quality, transparent care in India than they are here. An insurance-company medical officer quoted in the article says there’s “a lot more willingness to share data about complication rates, the total number of procedures and the outcomes.”
Now, I’m all for people receiving the best possible care at the lowest possible cost. But the fact that sending a patient to the other side of the world and back is less expensive than putting him up at a local hospital should send a strong signal to our policymakers (President-elect Obama, are you listening?) that our current system is beyond repair.
Photo used under a Creative Commons license from betta design.
