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?
