Outsourcing to India now extends to services

[kranky]

Today's Wall Street Journal has a story about a guy from Canada who needed a hip replacement. He gets health care free in Canada, but would have had to wait a year. Instead he traveled to India and had the surgery done for a fourth of the cost it would have been in the US.

I wonder if this will catch on for expensive medical procedures. If someone is facing even a $10,000 expense, it could be cheaper to go to India even factoring in the travel/living costs. This assumes the level of care is equal, and the story didn't say it wasn't.

 

[Vette73]

BUT for something like that I would NOT trust someone from another country IN another country.
What if they F up, you are SOL. Theres no sueing, or filing a complaint.

I look at it this way, how much is YOUR life worth?

 

[isasir]

Interesting. It's almost a good thing that India is on the other side of the world. If a trip to India took less than 8 hours for someone living in North America, I could see something like this catching on, since the doctors there are probably just as skilled. The technology in the US though would be much better.

 

[tnitsuj]

I posted about this earlier in regards to heart surgery. People from Europe are flying to India for state of the art heart surgery.

Heck, most of the doctors I go to here are Indians anyway.

 

[SagaLore]

I don't mind exporting anything to anywhere.

I just makes our Nation more efficient, and gives our government policies a kick in the butt.

For example, our Economy may not have grown as it has in the last 50 years, if we had not exported so much labor to China/Japan/Korea for building small parts. They get good at it, we get it at a good price, that price savings it passed along to the consumer, who can buy more stuff. Plus, those foreign families that would otherwise have suffered found employment.

In the meanwhile, companies in the U.S. have to build more productive product lines because they can't hire anybody to put up with such small wages, so they invest in robotics and cost-saving procedures. Eventually national companies can compete with the international companies, producing an even better product, while promoting jobs for those who have to support the advanced technology.

Now we come full circle. Technology jobs are getting outsourced. The same thing is going to happen - it's going to stimulate efficiences and quality, and benefit us and everyone else.

Outsourced healthcare is the next natural step. The governments create ineffective and costly legislation, lawsuits and high insurance force good doctors away from areas that need them. India will pick it up for awhile, Canada/U.S. will have to compete, fix the laws, limit the lawsuits, get quality doctors and record time response time to compete.

 

[samgau]

If you got money, you can get first class healthcare in India... and considering the exchange rate, its not that hard.... and staying in India is not expensive at all....