It’s bad enough that most of our tech and customer service jobs wind up in India in a sad attempt to cut out the “overpriced” American worker.

But now our MEDICAL PATIENTS are flocking to India, thanks to the greedy health care providers that won’t meet their needs here at home.

CNN featured a story today about global patients, or patients that travel abroad because they can get cheaper (and arguably better) treatment than they would in the US.

One such story in the article featured a woman that didn’t have insurance but needed a relatively simple heart procedure to save her life.  She was ultimately  quoted $175,000 for the procedure– which the doctors knew was totally out of her budget.

Yet because she needed the procedure to save her life, the woman ended up traveling to India and having the entire procedure done (including travel expenses) for under $10,000.

That’s a huge difference and really quite sad that American people would have to take their medical “business” to India because of the greed and corruption here in the US.

The story also reminded me of Michael Moore’s latest movie “Sicko” (and whether you love him or hate– this movie is a MUST SEE), where 9/11 victims traveled to Mexico to get the lung treatments they couldn’t afford in the US.

The whole situation is just totally unconscionable to me.

Number one, we are in the middle of a recession.  We can’t afford any more American dollars going overseas.

And number two, I can’t understand how these health care executives sleep at night.  When did we get so concerned about turning a profit that we started to justify HUMAN BEINGS suffering like that?

Listen to the mentality of the Indian doctor featured in this story:

“We [surgeons in India] want to make a profit, but we don’t want to profiteer. We don’t want squeeze people and I think American industries should also think that way,” Jha said.

I agree with this doctor 100%.  Especially when someone’s life is at stake.

And maybe, just maybe if all Americans adopted this philosophy, we wouldn’t be in the big, greed created mess that we are today.

Photo courtesy of Flickr creative commons author Tourist_on_Earth

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.