BBC Radio Four (indeed any part of the B.B.C.) is not where one would expect to find support for liberty, but a few a days ago I heard, on the Radio 4 Today Program, a report on medical care.
According to the report private hospitals in India (including in Calcutta) offer British people medical care at least as good as that provided by the NHS, and in wonderful conditions (marble floors, everything clean rather than the dirt, and decay one finds in British government hospitals – thousands of people die every year in Britain from infections they pick up whilst in government hospitals) and at a small fraction of the cost of the (highly regulated) British private hospitals.
The Labour MP Frank Field (a man known for his honesty – hard to believe in a politician, but it is true in his case) came on to the program and claimed that a constituent of his was being left to go blind by the NHS, people are normally left to rot for long periods of time by the government medical service, but his sight was saved by sending him to an Indian hospital.
The price of his medical care (not including the cost of flying to India, I admit) was £50 – in Britain the medical care would have cost (according to Mr Field) £3000.
So the choices were – go to a highly regulated British private hospital (if you happen to have £3000), rely on government medical care (and go blind), or go overseas.
Being a Labour MP Mr Field wanted the NHS to pay to send people to private hospitals in India (they put administrative barriers in the way of this [“it is too far”] – although they are willing to spend far more money sending people to European hospitals), but this was the closest I have ever come to hearing both the BBC and a Labour MP condemn statism in health care.
Now you mention it, this sounds like such an obvious niche for a country like India to fill. Make it really easy to set up a hospital by basically keeping the state out of it; wait for companies to set up private hospitals and provide good quality health care at low cost; and wait for the disgruntled foreigners and their $$$ to come rolling in. How can it fail?
As an added bonus India gets to keep some of the doctors who might otherwise have migrated to the UK or USA.
Doctor outsourcing? Expect the quality of Indian healthcare to be demonized by the left as soon as this catches on.
My socialist friends who have foriegn aquaintances like to trumpet anecdotal evidence of how great “free health care” is in England, France, Cuba, Canada, Anywherebutamerica. Thanks for giving me some evidence to the contrary.
Medical tourism is already being encouraged in Singapore here. IIRC, there are less and less barriers to setting up private hospitals, and the only limitation is the high cost of land and the scarcity of local doctors.
TWG
The only problem with this idea is that it is predicated on the low costs on India remaining low forever. Will costs remain low forever? I don’t know. Part of the reason currently is the currency diffential due to weakening of the rupee over the last decade, part of the reason is abundance of cheap labor for support task, and part of the reason is that they have access to research that was bought and paid for by consumers and taxpayers in western countries. I wonder if the other reason is that bureacracy in private Indian hospitals is less because they primarily cater to people paying directly for service so they don’t need a whole lot of people to deal with insurance forms and such. And I wonder how strong malpractice laws are in India? And just imagine trying to get compensation for economic losses appropriate for the country from which the patient came when a poor outcome occurs. It could bankrupt those hospitals.
In the long run, the only way to get the cost of medical treatment to go down is to find ways to improve the productivity doctors and nurses and lower the costs of materials used in treatment.
Not necessarily. I’d suspect the cost of US medicine is so staggeringly high largely because of the legal system, and the insurance costs it imposes on providers. France is a good comparator, I submit, because they too have an insurance-based back office bureaucracy dealing with patients’ payments. It’s costly, but not nearly as costly. (Nnd not free pace diablo blanco’s friends.) And the French system too, is driven by patient demand.
The big problem with the British system is Stalinist comand and control bureaucracy, which isn’t incompatible with high factor productivity and cheap materials. British medicine is probably more cost effective and productive than most Western systems. It is certainly cheaper than almost all. But that doesn’t mean it is good enough for people who might be used to choice. Central direction is incompatible with standards determined by professional vocation or customer service, and it stunts or destroys innovation and personal responsibility.
The advantage Indian outsourcing offers is not necessarily just in price, but in flexibility and quality of provision. That’s what the NHS establishment really hates.
The United States should try and get back to the freedom it had before the A.M.A. managed to get doctor licensing through in State after State and close most medical schools (using reports that were tissues of lies).
Every “reform” since then has just made things worse. For example the explosion of costs produced by Medicare and Medicaid – these started off at a billion Dollars in 1965 how many HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS are they now?
And (of course) the government spending pushes up the costs for private payers also (but even the not-for-profit Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance schemes did that from the 1950’s).
The old system of fraternities (who now remembers that these were mass organizations of ordinary people – not just student clubs) paying to keep doctors working for them directly (not per treatment) worked rather better.
In Britain it was much the same. In 1911 80% (and rising) of working men were members of “Friendly Societies”. Private insurance compaines also played a good role (although mainly for middle class people) – but they were (rightly) mostly for-profit companies.
Not-for-profit only works with fraternities-friendly societies.
As for the insane corruption of tort law.
It is not in the interests of a baker to sell bad bread or a doctor to kill the sick.
Reputation and fear of exposure (by the relevant media) should be a factor here.
There is also the matter of HONOUR (which does exist), most doctors value healing the sick – “defensive medicine” (every medical choice made with one eye on the danger of a John Edwards) HARMS the sick (s pushing up costs).
Somehow the “as well as” got eliminated in the “pushing up costs” above.
The point is a double one. “Defensive medicine” is not just more expensive medical care it is also WORSE medical care.
Some in the US are also flying overseas to get treatment. The only problem is if something goes wrong.
ProtestWarrior has a bumpersticker I keep swearing I’m going to buy:
END OVERPOPULATION
Support Socialized Medicine
‘Choice’ is the buzzword in the UK at the moment. I don’t think the average Brit wants choice. What (s)he wants is hospital care without waiting (for example, I’ve got to wait until next May just to have my hearing tested).
I don’t care where I have to go for the test, but I don’t want to wait seven months for it.
eerm… doesnt that mean you want to choose when you have your treatement William ?? As in you want to choose to have treatment now (regardless of where it is) rather than wait 7 months (or more).
No, If I wanted to choose ‘when’ I’d ‘choose’ to have it done privately. I would just like it done in a reasonable time-frame. Seven months is not reasonble when you consider the taxes we pay in the UK (and I’ve been paying them for nearly forty years).
It’s just as well I’m not pregnant 😉
Thinking of going to India for Medical Treatement? Please DONT. A butcher in your country will do a better job then doctors in India
My father in-law underwent an open heart by-pass surgery at one of the so called most prestigeous hospital in Delhi in middle of June 2005. The operation went so horribly wrong that the doctors performed a second open heart surgery on him within two hours of the first one. Even then they could not rectify the problem which was created in the first operation and therefore they did a third open heart surgery on him the following day. My father-in-law did not gain consciousness ever again. The doctors at the hospital did not tell us the true state of his condition at any time. It is only when a CT scan was conducted on him 25th June (on our insistence) that an ‘external’ neurologist advised us that he was in a deep comma. A large part of his brain was badly affected by brain hemorrhage and there were blood clots everywhere. But the doctors at this prestigeous hospital had all along been telling us that he was only unconscious due to heavy sedation and he would be alright. Who could survive thre open heart surgeries in two days. Eventually he died in this hospital two weeks later.
We believe that this so called prestigeous hospital is nothing more then a commerciallied business where the pirmary motive is to suck every cent out of the patient specially if you are a forign patient or a relative of an non-resident Indian. The doctors are absolutely incompetent and there is no accountability what so ever.
The hospital claims 99.9% success rate in by-pass surgery which appears to be absolutely a lie as people have witnessed 10 bodies (dead!) being released on a single morning from this hospital.
So why bother travelling such a long distance. A butcher in your own country will do a better job.