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Posts Tagged ‘Emergency Rooms’

Healing Holidays – Medical Tourism at Its Best

January 18th, 2010 No comments

For centuries, people have been traveling far and wide to be healed and yet today with all the information available at the fingertips, patients are still wary of trusting their health in the hands of a doctor thousands of miles away. However with the numbers of uninsured pegged at 47 million and the numbers of those not covered by dental insurance at 120 million, the medical scenario in US is grim with no end in sight.

Increasing medical costs and decreasing health benefits, is taking a heavy toll on those with either no insurance or a limited cover. At an age when health benefits are most sought, people struggle to stay healthy instead, for fear of rising medical bills. More often than not, the decision to stay healthy is taken right out of their hands and lands them in emergency rooms, where they are taken care of for the moment, but a lifetime of medical bills choke them to death. Even for those who live under a false security blanket that they are insured, having paid fat premiums all their productive years on the assurance that they will be provided quality health care when they need it the most, were in for a rude shock when news broke out that California Blue Cross, the state’s largest health insurance providers has been found guilty of systematically dropping policy holders, when they become sick or pregnant.

In a scenario like this, most often they are forced to seek out alternatives and one of the most attractive on the horizon in traveling to other countries, which promise the same medical attention if not better at 1/10th of the costs as in a hospital in the US. What however finally clinches the deal for the patient, to board the plane and travel 10,000 miles for the very first time in their lives, is a promise of a holiday in an exotic locale thrown in as part of the healing process.

The promise of a world class medical treatment at any of the Joint Commission International (JCI) accredited hospitals in India, China, Thailand, Philippines and others, an extended comfortable stay for the patient and a family member in hospital rooms which offer the luxuries of a five-star hotel room and the availability of a 24 hour registered nurse beats the odds out of treatments here. Besides the crippling costs, the hospitals budgeting needs here means shorter and shorter post-operative stays, which does not bode well with the elderly and the pregnant women.

Though over the last ten years, medical tourism in these countries is booming, thanks to half a million foreign patients to India alone till last year, there are still several millions who are hesitant to take the first step and research the information needed to put their mind and body at rest with the medical options available elsewhere. For those not so discerning patients, Global Health Care Facilitators have stepped in to find low cost, yet quality health care. One of the only three organizations promoting medical tourism here in the United States, Global HCF is just a click away from making a smooth transition to a hospital on foreign soil. The organization based in Cookeville and Nashville, Tennessee not only helps partner the patient with the right doctor, it also makes travel arrangements, takes care of accommodation and food with a consolidated bill at the end of a comfortable healing holiday.

To those cynics who believe in stories of botched surgeries floating around, Dr. Bill Thomas, the brain behind Global HCF, a seasoned traveler himself says that though life-saving medical procedures like heart surgeries, cancer treatment and elective surgeries like dental implants and cosmetic surgery cost as less at 1/10th of the costs of a procedure in the US, it is not because of a lack of expertise, rather a lack of malpractice suits and high administrative costs, which has crippled the health industry here. A surgery which would cost 50,000 dollars and above here in hospital charges alone can be performed for as less as 10,000 dollars all inclusive of medical costs and a holiday package, a realistic amount which can be put together with savings and loans. Global HCF takes care to see that they partner with JCI certified hospitals. In most cases the doctors have been trained in USA and in Europe and have impeccable career records, with less than one percent failure rates.

Countries like India which are actively promoting medical tourism are increasingly seeking JCI certification, to instill faith in the medical tourists coming to them, very well realizing that the publicity generated by one botched surgery could de-rail a burgeoning industry, expected to jump 30 percent every year. Besides the hospitals equipped with the latest medically advanced diagnostic equipments, Indian pharmaceutical companies too meet stringent requirements of the US Food and Drug administration. Medical advancements have meant that Indian doctors can now perform the hip re-surfacing surgery among others where the damaged bone is scraped away and replaced with chrome alloy, an operation which costs less and causes less post-operative trauma than the traditional hip replacement procedure done in the US.

To those who refuse to believe that anything could surpass the medical treatment available here in the US, there are statistics to show that the doctors in these developing countries, have far more expertise and a higher success rate in handling complicated life-saving surgeries, than the doctors here in the US, thanks just to the sheer volume of surgeries they handle on a daily basis. Besides in most cases, treatment here in the US is hardly an option for those with little or no insurance. In such a scenario, if traveling to an exotic destination would mean that they can be healed and lead a productive life post-surgery, instead of wasting away for want of expensive, medical care, then it certainly seems worth taking that one chance.

Vijaya Nadar
http://www.articlesbase.com/medicine-articles/healing-holidays-medical-tourism-at-its-best-139666.html

USA health Care system. Hospitals and Pharmaceutical Companies are at present rationing health care. Is it so?

December 19th, 2009 2 comments

Rationing by ability to pay.
Dr. Art Kellermann, associate dean for public policy at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, recently wrote of a woman who came into his emergency room in critical condition because a blood vessel had burst in her brain. She was uninsured and had chosen to buy food for her children instead of spending money on her blood-pressure medicine. In the emergency room, she received excellent high-tech medical care, but by the time she got there, it was too late to save her.

A New York Times report on the high costs of some drugs illustrates the problem. Chuck Stauffer, an Oregon farmer, found that his prescription-drug insurance left him to pay $5,500 for his first 42 days of Temodar, a drug used to treat brain tumors, and $1,700 a month after that. For Medicare patients drug costs can be even higher, because Medicare can require a copayment of 25 percent of the cost of the drug. For Gleevec, a drug that is effective against some forms of leukemia and some gastrointestinal tumors, that one-quarter of the cost can run to $40,000 a year.

In Britain, everyone has health insurance. In the U.S., some 45 million do not, and nor are they entitled to any health care at all, unless they can get themselves to an emergency room. Hospitals are prohibited from turning away anyone who will be endangered by being refused treatment. But even in emergency rooms, people without health insurance may receive less health care than those with insurance. Joseph Doyle, a professor of economics at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., studied the records of people in Wisconsin who were injured in severe automobile accidents and had no choice but to go to the hospital. He estimated that those who had no health insurance received 20 percent less care and had a death rate 37 percent higher than those with health insurance. This difference held up even when those without health insurance were compared with those without automobile insurance, and with those on Medicaid — groups with whom they share some characteristics that might affect treatment. The lack of insurance seems to be what caused the greater number of deaths.

When the media feature someone like Bruce Hardy or Jack Rosser, we readily relate to individuals who are harmed by a government agency’s decision to limit the cost of health care. But we tend not to hear about — and thus don’t identify with — the particular individuals who die in emergency rooms because they have no health insurance. This “identifiable victim” effect, well documented by psychologists, creates a dangerous bias in our thinking. Doyle’s figures suggest that if those Wisconsin accident victims without health insurance had received equivalent care to those with it, the additional health care would have cost about $220,000 for each life saved. Those who died were on average around 30 years old and could have been expected to live for at least another 40 years; this means that had they survived their accidents, the cost per extra year of life would have been no more than $5,500 — a small fraction of the $49,000 that NICE recommends the British National Health Service should be ready to pay to give a patient an extra year of life. If the U.S. system spent less on expensive treatments for those who, with or without the drugs, have at most a few months to live, it would be better able to save the lives of more people who, if they get the treatment they need, might live for several decades.
Seldon Surak II, It seems that you have thought a lot about the subject.
For those who do not consider economic rationing "rationing", use the phrase "limiting the delivery of wanted services".
That limitation is caused by price and the ability or inability to pay for wanted services.

you BET it is!

THAT IS WHY THEY ARE LYING ABOUT REFORM!

HERE IS THE TRUTH:
THERE WILL BE NO NATIONALIZATION OF HEALTH CARE

THE ONLY THING THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO DO IS ADD AN OPTION FOR NON-PROFIT INSURANCE FOR THE POOR & UNEMPLOYED.

[I go to the Dallas VA Medical Center and the government doesn’t even run THAT!]

HOW WILL THEY PAY FOR IT?
>DRUG DISCOUNTS
>CONCENTRATING ON PREVENTATIVE CARE
[Currently, the poor only have the E.R. at county hospitals and that’s THE MOST EXPENSIVE CARE THERE IS!]
>ELIMINATING WASTE &
>LOCKING UP PEOPLE WHO COMMIT FRAUD!

WANNA KNOW WHO DOESN’T WANT CHANGE?
THE INSURANCE COMPANIES
THEY EAT 40% OF EVERY HEALTH CARE DOLLAR.

FOR WHAT WE PAY NOW, WE COULD INSURE EVERY MAN, WOMAN & CHILD IN AMERICA WITH NO DEDUCTIBLE, NO COPAY COVERAGE.