I just watched the following video…

Veiovis inside business

These are some great examples of how medical tourism can work well.

It’s great to see insurance companies evolving and including global options in their health plans.

Also of note, is that Veiovis has recently added New Zealand to its network.

Related posts:

1. The Wider World of Global Healthcare

I’m sitting here in New Zealand feeling frustrated after reading Kinsey Gidick’s article True Tales about Healthcare Abroad. Nothing against Gidick, the article makes for an interesting read.

While the article does a great job of proving a point regarding the exorbitant cost of healthcare in the USA and the Medical Tourism alternatives available, Gidick, along with the vast majority of US media, polarizes the concept of socialized healthcare.

I’m referring to the section entitled “United Kingdom or Magic Kingdom”:

Dr. Evans disagrees. “I had a good friend of mine who lived on the west coast of England who was in his 80s and suffered from terrible chronic neuropathic pain,” he says. “After months of waiting, he was at last able to see a neurosurgeon who confirmed that he needed surgery to correct his problem. They put him down on the books for surgery 11 months out. Granted the surgery and all his care was free, but had he been in this country I could have picked up the phone and had him in a surgical suite in a week.”

Why is it that, regardless of whether they are ‘for’ or ‘against’ socialized healthcare, the US media insist on packaging a nations healthcare up in a nice tidy box that either has ‘socialized’ or ‘not socialized’ (or more correctly ‘American system’ or ‘Canadian system’) written on the front. The reality is that it is not this black and white.

Having lived and worked in the UK for a period of time, I’m in a fairly safe position to say that, much like New Zealand’s system, the chap Dr. Evans refers to had options, something that neither the US or the Canadian system would provide.

A quick Google of “private neurosurgeons UK” gives an abundance of competent surgeons. So had this patient been willing to pay he could have avoided the long wait he experienced.

or

Again through the powers of google it is pretty easy to confirm that there are elective insurance options available that would have covered this man for private surgery, again avoiding the wait lists.

or

He could have gone with the option he did…. Suffer the wait and receive free treatment.

Safe to say that even if Dr. Evan’s friend had chosen to pay, it would have been significantly cheaper than paying for the same care in the USA.

So why, when there are systems around that can offer so much choice, do the US media focus on perhaps the two least flexible systems around?

This recent article in the New York Times clearly highlights the disconnect between consumers and the US health system. These individual stories not only highlight the personal issues that these people face, but the economic concern that these people should be recognized as presenting to the US economy. These are stories about people in their economic prime who instead of being able live life and focus the contributions they can make to their families, communities and the wider economy through their work, worry more about the risks and complications of  living with or without Health Insurance, knowing that they are probably quite literally one medical incident away from potential financial disaster.

The New York Times introduces the story as follows and I quote.

“Much of the debate about health care reform focuses on people who don’t have insurance. But as Karen Barrow explores during the latest Patient Voices series, even people with insurance coverage are struggling with bills, confusing policies and red tape.

Six men and women share their experiences with health coverage and insurance issues. You’ll meet Tasha Huebner, 41, who found dealing with the insurance company worse than dealing with breast cancer. “With insurance, it was always a big surprise, what are they going to deny next?” she says.

Once she called her insurance company to find out why a $5,000 surgery bill had been denied. She was told it was because she had one too many nurses in the operating room during her surgery. “At that point I hung up on my insurance representative that I was talking to,” she says. “I didn’t even know what to do with that.”

Zoraida Reyes, 46, is a small business owner who was forced to cut health insurance, including her own. “I work six days a week, and I can’t afford insurance,” she says. “You can imagine the people who have a lot less than me, they’re probably worse off.”

And there’s Carl Arrington, 58, who lost his health insurance after his Internet company closed. Instead of paying for health insurance, he decided to invest in his health, changing his diet and exercising more. “If you’re in your 50s or 60s and you don’t have medical insurance and you don’t get it through your employer, it’s going to cost you two or three thousand dollars a month. With that kind of money I could see a doctor every week.”

Adrienne Schroeder, 31, has high-deductible health insurance through her husband’s job but is saddled with medical debt as a result of four pregnancies in six years, including two that ended in miscarriages. “Since we have insurance we should not be worried about having a baby or having a miscarriage and be stressed about how long it takes to pay it off,” she says. “Our daughter is near 18 months, and we’re nowhere near paying off these hospital bills.

The majority of the people in this story are representative of a Medical Traveler demographic that are coming to New Zealand in gradually increasing numbers for non-urgent or elective medical procedures as an alternative to the high cost of care in the US.

Every year, more than 44,000 Americans die simply because they have no health insurance. Congressman Grayson recently launched a website http://www.namesofthedead.com/ to honor but a few of the unfortunate masses.

Reading the stories on the site dispels the common misconception that the uninsured population is largely comprised of illegal immigrants and societies parasites. These people are just “Joe Average Americans” that are victims of the US health care system.

As a New Zealander I find this hard to fathom, as do most other people I discuss this with… a first world country similar to ours, with people dying unnecessarily because they cannot afford healthcare… Surely not! This is a third world problem they say – you must be mistaken.

What ever happened to the American Dream?
Are all men created equal except for those who cannot access medical insurance??

Where does Medical Travel fit into this?
It is not and will not ever be a panacea for the US Health system, but it can certainly help.
Medical Travel is not for everyone. There are some people that travelling for treatment is simply unsuitable for and some procedures which do not fit the criteria, for example, treatment that requires multiple visits over a long period of time.

However there are people living with pain and illness that may benefit from affordable treatment offshore. As I read the names of the dead, I tick off many that we could have helped, particularly in the early stages. The big question is, how do we get the message through?

Related posts:

1. The Wider World of Global Healthcare

As medical tourism grows in the US it is interesting which groups benefit the most and which groups are the most unsettled as a result. As the Harvard Business Review points medical tourism is a disruptive technology and will end up influencing elective healthcare in the USA. Whether the impact of this disruptive force is large or small will depend on the degree of adoption of medical tourism or medical travel by US consumers and businesses.

Consumers have now a choice about affordable elective surgery that insurance companies currently have little influence over. Any new system that gives customers an additional choice will be by its nature disruptive. Medical tourism is no different. The degree of adoption will however largely be dependent on how closely health consumers ‘buying decisions’ and medical tourism destinations ‘selling processes” align. Coupled with this is how closely the medical and cultural environment of health customer’s home country is mirrored in the destination to where the medical tourist is heading. American medical travelers who speak only English will be far more comfortable in a country whose environment is English speaking not just its doctors.

This notion of upsetting the current system is probably the reason health insurers in the USA have been slow to adopt medical tourism programs. To adopt them is unsettling for insurers. The cost savings seem very attractive but how does one actually implement and integrate such an option into a plan? This is even more difficult if the insurers themselves are not prepared to travel to the medical tourist destination and see for themselves how much of a foreign experience the trip would be for one of their customers.

However the insurers are somewhat missing the point by not at least considering medical tourism as an option: the early adopters will have an advantage over the late comers as first mover advantage in this market confers significant benefits into terms of capacity, cost realization, learnings and subsequent innovation gleaned from being involved in other medical systems that may be able to teach the US about healthcare provision.