Insurance companies promote medical tourism programs
These days, everyone is taking shots at the American healthcare system. It’s inefficient. It’s uncaring. It’s overpriced. It’s unfair and exclusionary. Over the course of the recent election cycle, we’ve heard all of these charges and more, as politicians vow to “fix” this broken system.
But ask yourself this: are you so disgusted by the excesses of the American healthcare system that you’re willing to put your money where your mouth – or hip, or knee, or even your heart – is? Because the health insurer WellPoint, Inc., is betting that its customers will be willing to have major surgeries performed overseas in order to save a buck.
Next year, WellPoint plans to launch a pilot “medical tourism” program, which will send its patients to India for certain medical procedures. Last year, as many as 750,000 Americans went abroad to have knee or hip replacements in India for as little as $8,000 – just a tenth of what the operations cost in the U.S. WellPoint subsidiary, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin, will be arranging for the medical care and travel service associated with this program.
But this isn’t some gesture of goodwill. Make no mistake: WellPoint is not sponsoring this medical tourism effort to give their customers more affordable options – they’re doing it as part of their ongoing war against U.S. doctors groups. And they’re using their customers as pawns.
A medical tourism scheme could help insurance companies shrink market share for doctor groups, thereby giving insurance companies the upper hand over doctors in setting prices.
“When there is a threat of losing market share it may bring folks to the table to have a dialogue about a more effective rate for us,” says Anthem’s chief medical officer Razia Hashmi.
Can you believe this? Clearly Anthem’s “Chief Medical Officer” is more concerned about forcing doctors groups to bend to what that insurance company considers “a more effective rate” for them. In other words, this medical tourism effort isn’t about getting a higher standard of care for the patients that Anthem and WellPoint insure, it’s about increasing the insurance company’s profits!
The pilot program will send patients to places of such medical renown as Bangalore and New Delhi to have complex joint replacement procedures and even lower back fusion. And Hashmi also makes the outrageous claim that the care quality of this medical tourism program will be “equal” to that of U.S. hospitals.
This is stunning to me: Who in their right mind could possibly believe that the standard of medical care in a Third World city could be anywhere near the standard of U.S. care? I don’t care about WellPoint’s assurances that all procedures available in this program will comply with the American Medical Association’s rules regarding service standards. After all, what authority or oversight does the AMERICAN Medical Association have in INDIA?
My only hope is that patients are smart enough to avoid having themselves turned into guinea pigs just so insurance companies like WellPoint can make more off of their already too high premiums. But patients everywhere are likely to be getting the full-court press to take their medial problems overseas in the near future – Aetna Inc. launched their version of the same kind of program, and both UnitedHealth Group and Cigna are also “studying” the idea.
Just remember one thing about those $8,000 surgeries: you get what you pay for.
