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Amazingly enough, health care is getting so expensive here in the US that insurers are actually starting to authorize travel for procedures. Of course, there must be something in it for them…$$$. See artcile in WSJ.
Medical tourism is big business in Costa Rica and we have a couple of articles discussing that …
The main paragraph pertaining to Costa Rica is as follows:
“Some individual policies offer medical-tourism options. Ben Schreiner, a retired executive for Bank of America, recently traveled to Clinica Biblica in Costa Rica for a hernia operation that cost $3,900. His policy with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of South Carolina has a $10,000 deductible. Surgery would have cost about $13,000 in his state, he says, so he saved about $6,100. The 62-year-old traveled free using frequent-flier miles. “The hospital is state of the art. The stuff is really up to date and modern and the doctors couldn’t have been better.”
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comIs this the wave of the future? You need a certain kind of operation and your greedy-for-profit insurer say, “sure, we’ll pay for it, but you have to go to India, or Thailand, or CR,” or who the hell knows.
The facility has to be certified by the same people that certify american medical facilities. This would eliminate all countries in Africa, except possibly South Africa and probably the majority of SE Asian countries. The catch is that the major portion of the exhorbitant health costs are totally predicated by lawsuits. There was a recent article on this web site regarding that very subject of how a litigious society we are in th US. These very same lawsuits cost the insurers tons of money, which they pass on in premium increases to their customers. As a business owner, our health insurance costs have increased double digits every year. When will it end? The question arises, why does the same procedure at CIMA, which is a US company run hospital affiliated with Baylor Medical School, with US trained doctors cost a fraction of what the same procedure does in the US. Same doctors, but no concern about malpractice insurance that costs the average family practitioner $100,000/year. Texas passed a tort reform law two years ago with respect to medical malpractice. Since then 2,000 + doctors have trnsferred their medical practies to Texas and medical malpractice premiums have been reduced 50%. Do you see the underlying problem here? There are more lawyers in the Columbia Tower (76 stories) in downtown Seattle, Washington than the entire country of Japan. 75% of our congress are attorneys!! Law in he US is a self-perpetuating business and costs all of us very dearly. There is little hope for tort reform on a national scale.
“The question arises, why does the same procedure at CIMA, which is a US company run hospital affiliated with Baylor Medical School, with US trained doctors cost a fraction of what the same procedure does in the US.”
For one thing, the doctor isn’t making $2M+ a year! As for a litigation-driven society, I agree to some extent, but when it comes to medicine in the US the stats are frightening! 100,000 people a year die JUST from taking medication — either the wrong one, or some voodo polypharmacy that kills them, or the just plain bad, unproven drugs which are recalled 5 years later, but not before they killed or maimed a squadron of people. Right now there are probably two or three thousand pharmaceutical litigation cases pending, many of them with a thousand plaintiffs or more. Misdiagnosis and mistreatment are also rampant in the medical cabal. If an HMO only allows that doctor to dx a patient in ten minutes, how many mistakes do you think are going to be made? Medical litigation is a by-product of a totally corrupt healthcare system. It is not the root of the problem. And how many medical mistakes are made because the doctor was completely incompetent? It’s on the news all the time, and I personally know of a doc who amputated the wrong foot of a patient because he was completely hungover when he went into surgery! Thankfully, medicine in most other countries is still about providing care, not making a wheelbarrow full of cash everytime a patient walks through the door. The docs in Italy recently went on strike because of some of these issues — there the patient is still the primary object, not the money made from treating them.
Actually, the opposite is more frequent regarding pharmaceuticals. The FDA process is so full of red tape, that it takes years to get successful drugs to market which only adds to the outrageous cost. This is wht so many Americans travle to Canada for prescription medications. Personally, I like the CR approach. If you have a good idea wht is ailing you, then you can get the medicine you need right from the pharmacist without the gatekeeper system that we have in the US.
$2 million a year is an exageration. Only the top heart and brain surgeons make anywhere close to $2 million per year. Kost family practitioners earn $100,000/year; the other $100,000 oes to their malpractice provider. A chief of a department at a major metro hospital would make somewhere between $400,000-$500,000.The gov’t pays for most R and D of pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, I know more about this topic than almost anyone considering I spent nearly ten years in litigation against the world’s largest pharmaceutical company and had access to internal documents that prove most drugs are dangerous, inadequately tested, and then unscrupulous doctors are paid to sign off on the clinical trials. You’d be better off many times just taking rat poison! You ain’t seen any kind of corruption until you’ve take a very close look at this mess called Big Pharma. My former brother-in-law is a doctor in Beverly Hills. Salary? $1.75 Million!
Beverly Hills, must be a plastic surgeon and $1.75 is certainly not the norm. This is the average, just to prove a point:
SPECIALTY Years 1-2 >3 Max
Allergy/ Immunology $158,000 $221,000 $487,000
Ambulatory $ 80,000 $112,000 $152,000
Anesthesiology: Pediatrics $ 283,000 $311,000 $378,000
Anesthesiology: General $207,000 $275,000 $448,000
Anesthesiology: Pain Management $315,000 $370,000 $651,000
Cardiology: Invasive $258,000 $395,000 $647,000
Cardiology: Interventional $290,000 $468,000 $811,000
Cardiology: Noninvasive $268,000 $403,000 $599,000
Critical Care $187,000 $215,000 $320,000
Dermatology $ 195,000 $308,000 $452,000
Emergency Medicine $192,000 $216,000 $295,000
Endocrinology $171,000 $187,000 $260,000
FP (with OB) $182,000 $204,000 $241,000
FP (w/o OB) $161,000 $135,000 $239,000
FP – Sports Medicine $ 152,000 $208,000 $363,000
FP – Urgent Care $ 128,000 $198,000 $299,000
Gastroenterology $265,000 $349,000 $590,000
Hematology/Oncology $181,348 $245,000 $685,000
Infectious Disease $154,000 $178,000 $271,000
Internal Medicine $154,000 $176,000 $238,000
IM (Hospitalist) $161,000 $172,000 $245,000
Medicine/Pediatrics $139,000 $168,000 $271,000
Medical Oncology $198,000
$257,000 $455,000
Neonatal Medicine $286,000 $310,000 $381,000
Nephrology $191,000 $269,000 $447,000
Neurology $180,000 $228,000 $345,000
Obstetrics/Gynecology $211,000 $261,000 $417,000
Gynecology $159,000 $213,000 $358,000
Maternal/Fetal Medicine $286,000 $322,000 $610,000
Occupational Medicine $139,000 $185,000 $290,000
Ophthalmology $138,000 $314,000 $511,000
Ophthalmology Retina $280,000 $469,000 $716,000
Orthopedic Surgery $256,000 $342,000 $670,000
ORS – Foot & Ankle $228,000 $392,000 $791,000
ORS – Hand & Upper Extremities $288,000 $459,000 $770,000
ORS – Hip & Joint Replacement $330,000 $491,000 $715,000
ORS – Spine Surgery $398,000 $670,000 $1,352,000
ORS – Sports Medicine $266,000 $479,000 $762,000
Otorhinolaryngology $194,000 $311,000 $516,000
Pathology $169,000 $321,000 $610,000
Pediatrics $135,000 $175,000 $271,000
Pediatrics – Cardiology $145,000 $282,000 $607,000
Pediatrics – Critical Care $196,000 $259,000 $398,000
Pediatrics – Hematology/Oncology $182,000 $217,000 $251,000
Pediatrics – Neurology $175,000 $189,000 $362,000
Physiatry $169,000 $244,000 $313,000
Podiatry $128,000 $168,000 $292,000
Psychiatry $149,000 $169,000 $238,000
Psychiatry – Child and Adolescent $158,000 $189,000 $265,000
Pulmonary Medicine + Critical Care $215,000 $288,000 $417,000
Radiation Oncology $241,000 $385,000 $787,000
Radiology $201,000 $354,000 $911,000
Rheumatology $179,000 $229,000 $378,000
Surgery – General $226,000 $291,000 $520,000
Surgery – Cardiovascular $336,000 $515,000 $811,000
Surgery – Neurological $354,000 $541,000 $936,000
Surgery – Plastic $237,000 $412,000 $820,000
Surgery – Vascular $270,000 $329,000 $525,000
Urology $261,000 $358,000 $619,000
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