Remember when we were the gold standard? Now, there’s an entire niche industry springing up to help Americans get good health care they can afford.
From CNN:
Sandra Giustina is a 61-year-old uninsured American. For three years she saved her money in hopes of affording heart surgery to correct her atrial fibrillation. “They [US hospitals] told me it would be about $175,000, and there was just no way could I come up with that,” Giustina said.
So, with a little digging online, she found several high quality hospitals vying for her business…. Within a month, she was on a plane from her home in Las Vegas, Nevada, to New Delhi, India. Surgeons at Max Hospital fixed her heart for “under $10,000 total, including travel.”
How do they do it? With wacky ideas like these one: “Max neurosurgeon Dr. Ajaya Jha said the hospital can provide high-quality care at low prices because the staff work hard to cut waste.
“I’ve seen hospitals in the US where they open up something costing $10,000 and say, ‘Oh it’s not working. OK, give me another one.’ We would never do that here. Even for 100 rupees (about $2) — we would say, “Do we need to open this suture? Do we need to open this gauze?’ We are very conscious of cost.”
The salary of a US surgeon is five times that of a surgeon in India. “We [surgeons in India] want to make a profit, but we don’t want to profiteer. We don’t want squeeze people and I think American industries should also think that way,” Jha said.
Profit, not profiteering. What a concept.
