If it Moves, Outsource It
I am loving this. Reader Sally V. sent a link to a hilarious story indicating that outsourcing may be part of the solution to our health-care problems. In other words, as we have seen in other industries, when Americans charge too much, somebody else undercuts them and provides something better and cheaper.
Let’s see. Cars. Tech support. Machine tools. Electronics. Appliances. Cement. Can you believe we import cement? If we can profitably import something that heavy and cheap, we are in deep trouble.
What does that leave? Lap dances? Government? I guess you could say Barack Obama is outsourcing government to Tehran and Gaza, but the decisions are still filtered down through a lot of overpriced dead wood here in the States. It would be cheaper to have Abbas and Ahmedinejad run the country directly. No more $50,000 dinner dates for Obama and his wife.
Here’s the story. Guatemala has hospitals as good as our own, staffed by doctors trained in the US and Europe. They don’t have our Democrat-supported, parasitic tort problem. They are more efficient, because efficiency is too much to ask from the richest country in the world. And they need our business, and they are not taking our fees and dividing them up among strangers who don’t pay their bills. Or maybe they are, but the bite is much smaller.
You can fly there and live like a king while you get top-notch treatment, and when you come home with a nice tan, you’ll still be ahead by thousands of dollars. It’s cheap, even if they overcharge. What’s not to like?
I checked out medical tourism back when I was having gall bladder pains. I am not actually cheap, but I do resent paying more than I should. And American medical costs are obscene and unfair. Overseas treatment is a very good deal. You can go to places like India, for example. That may sound scary to you, but before you judge, maybe you should ask yourself how many turbans and dots you’ve seen at your local hospital. The Indians are not stupid, nor are they lazy or ignorant.
I guess medical people who read this will post self-serving comments, claiming I’m unpatriotic or that I need to support our ailing system with my dollars or that overseas care is risky. But the fact is, American doctors and hospitals charge much more than they’re worth, and they are not really better than foreign providers. I didn’t cause this problem. They did. Why should I put up with it? Buy your Mercedes honestly, if you want to keep me coming back.
I’ll give you an example which I have mentioned before. I had a kidney stone in 2003. I went to the emergency room. They gave me either an MRI or a CAT scan; I can’t recall which. I was there for maybe twelve hours. Cost? Over five thousand dollars. Treatment? None. They treated the pain (incompetently) and sent me home. I had to get leftover pills from someone else’s old prescription in order to get through the weekend.
Now, you can say I’m not a doctor, and that I don’t know what I needed. But that’s a stupid argument. Sometimes you have to be a doctor to know whether medical tests are justified, and sometimes you don’t. If I sprain my finger and someone tries to biopsy my liver, I am perfectly qualified to say he’s a crook or an idiot.
You don’t need expensive scans to diagnose kidney stones. Many, many thousands of patients have been sent home without even an x-ray. Doctors told them to wait and see if their stones passed. When they didn’t pass, the patients got surgery. In the meantime, they got antibiotics and painkillers. Today, they can give you an abdominal x-ray known as a KUB. Kidney stones show up on x-rays. I had a KUB in 2003, and it cost $250.
Where did the decision to get a KUB come from? A know-nothing disgruntled patient with no MD? No. It came from my urologist. After my hospital visit, I followed up with him. He gave me Percocet and Levaquin, and he told me to go home and pass the stone. After that happened, a lab looked at it for $40. He looked at the result and suggested a second expensive scan to make sure I was okay. I asked if that was absolutely necessary. He said a KUB would also be okay. The message was, “You can have a $5000 test or a $250 test. Either will work. Gosh, which would you rather have?”
If I hadn’t asked about the necessity of the scan, guess what would have happened? Five grand, down the toilet. For no reason whatsoever. I probably didn’t need the KUB, for that matter.
The urologist ended up charging something like $300, total. He even gave me sample antibiotics, for nothing. The hospital and drugstore got all the rest. And the hospital did very little for me. They even did the KUB. Maybe he got a kickback, but the fee went to the hospital.
I had a second kidney stone later, because I stupidly insisted on drinking huge amounts of tea in combination with dairy products. This time I called the urologist first, because it happened on a weekday, and I didn’t have to go to the ER. He has a receptionist who is so nasty she probably needs therapy. After thirty seconds on the phone with her, I decided not to get treatment. And I was fine. Saved six grand. Risked absolutely nothing except a little discomfort.
The purpose of the scan was to make money for the hospital, pure and simple. And it’s very typical.
Here’s a fun story. The brother of one of my college buddies became an ENT, and early in his practice, he learned he shouldn’t tell people not to get surgery. People came in for second opinions, and he told them they didn’t need to be cut up. The local doctors sat him down and told him he was not going to continue interfering with their cash flow. After that, he changed his ways. He’s not the only doctor in the US who has colleagues like that.
Medical care is too expensive. That’s the plain truth. It could be cheaper, but providers don’t care enough to make their prices fair. So if I can get better treatment in Guatemala, for less money, I’ll do it. Contrary to what gadget-crazy doctors may say, you don’t always need The Most Expensive Machine in the Hospital or The Machine That Goes “PING” to cure your constipation or warts or strep throat. They overtreat us because it makes them more money. If they can’t spend my money wisely, I may as well go to a nice hospital on the beach and recuperate with a pina colada in each hand.
The great thing about this plan is that liberals can’t interfere with it. They are not allowed to meddle with anything that makes health care cheap, even when it goes against their agenda in some fundamental way. Example: they won’t touch Canadian pharmacies. The excess money drug companies charge here in the states presumably goes to subsidize the lower prices they charge in places like Mexico and Bangladesh; it’s welfare, which liberals love. But if they try to explain that to greedy retirees who want cheap pills, they’ll get absolutely nowhere. Medical tourism is probably unstoppable, and it’s a great thing. It could destroy the monopoly that makes American health care overpriced, and it will probably improve the quality of care. Competition has a way of making things better. Look at the difference between a 2009 Ford and a 2009 Toyota, and compare it to the same difference in 1980. Ford still loses, but the margin is much smaller.
America is in a steep decline, but the free market is as strong as it has ever been. It is an eternal, fundamental principle of the universe. Like thermodynamics, it has an existence independent of our own. It existed before we did, and it will exist after the earth disappears. In the end, it always wins. If it sends me to sunny Guatemala instead of the Miami Heart Institute, so be it. I will manage to cope.