Hey, Let's Outsource Health Care to India!
by Susan Dentzer, Health Correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS
The Washington Post
October 31, 2004
It's the Taj Mahal of Health Insurance Schemes
By Susan Dentzer
(Following
are excerpts from Susan Dentzer's response to a Washington Post news
story of an uninsured carpenter from Durham, N.C. who outsourced his
own heart surgery to India, at a cost of $10,000, including
transportation. He could not afford the $200,000 his surgery would have
cost in this country.)
Good
grief, why didn't someone think of this earlier! Forty-five million
Americans lack health insurance, and covering every one of them would
be costly. Why not outsource them all to India?
Opponents
will immediately say this idea is impractical. I say, don't be health
coverage girlie men! First, not all the uninsured would have to travel
to India to get health care. For example, when an uninsured person
first got the sniffles, he or she could pick up the phone and talk with
someone at a call center in, say, Bangalore. An Indian nurse making $10
a day would listen (sympathetically, of course) and offer advice.
For
those uninsured in need of hands-on medical care, here's an idea: What
if some of those failing U.S. airlines converted to running medical air
shuttle services between, say, New York and New Delhi, or Boston and
Bombay? Uncle Sam could hire them as private contractors, then pay them
to ferry the uninsured back and forth.
The more
I think about this idea, the better I like it. Just imagine all the
problems it would solve: No more overcrowded emergency rooms choked
with uninsured patients. No more worries about a nursing shortage; by
transferring our patients to India, we'd outsource nursing care there,
too. Hospitals and doctors here would be freed up to do what makes most
sense for them economically: treat well-insured patients at steep
prices – even to the point of giving them care that they probably don't
need! Perform the most lucrative elective surgeries on relatively
healthy patients, rather than giving high-cost care to the sickest loss
leaders!
We all
know the uninsured are a terrible problem, an embarrassment, really,
for such a rich country as ours. Every other major industrialized
nation has figured out how to provide health coverage to most, if not
all, of its citizens. At last, here's a twist on globalization that
could really work for everybody. So let's get started. Who says
Americans can't take care of their own?
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