Hotwire For Surgery
10th July 2011
Over 1.5 million Americans travel abroad each year for medical procedures in what is called Medical Tourism. Services typically sought by medical tourists include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries such as heart surgery, dental surgery, joint replacement, and cosmetic surgeries. However, virtually every type of health care, including complementary & alternative treatments, psychiatry, and convalescent care are attracting Americans by saving as much as 90% off of medical procedures.
U.S. based healthcare providers have taken notice as have self-funded employers and health plans. The reality is most people, if given the choice, would rather travel for medical purposes to Tucson than Thailand to save time and uncertainty. Top surgical facilities realized they can be price competitive and have extra capacity so they have embarked on a program of domestic medical tourism. The byproduct, if you follow it to the logical extreme, is the creation of a national market for non-emergent surgery that has historically been strictly a local market. As the USA Today recently reported, costs commonly vary in healthcare by 600% or more (Source: change:healthcare) for the same procedure and same outcome even in the same city let alone from one to another.
The less friction there is to impede information flow, the more efficient markets become.
July 11th, 2011 at 12:49
Yet in a post above you excoriate the Obama administration for trying to help remove impediments to the information flow, thus making the market more efficient.
You can’t have it both ways.
July 11th, 2011 at 14:23
There isn’t any both ways to have it. Name one time that the government has removed impediments to anything. Government doesn’t remove impediments, it adds impediments. Always has, always will. The name of a government program is the most accurate predictor of what it WON’T do.
July 11th, 2011 at 16:14
Well, a few impediments in the way of all the slicing-and-dicing of worthless paper that led to the fall of Lehman Brothers and the bailout of AIG might have been helpful…but then, that would have Interfered With The All-Wise and All-Powerful Invisible Hand–which led us down the primrose path, as is always its wont.