Why Global Health Insurance Brokers Should Promote Medical Tourism ?

The world is shrinking; and many companies have become large multinationals , with  presence in countries all across the globe. Providing employee benefits is one of their key responsibilities, and since this has become such a challenging task, they outsource this to companies which specialise in administering and harmonising these benefits. Typically, they use a single health insurance broker to provide life insurance and health insurance coverage to all their employees across the globe.

Since there such a huge price differential between elective high ticket surgical procedures performed in India and the US ( for example, for knee replacement), I was wondering why health insurance brokers do not take advantage of this and offer medical tourism packages as part of their service offerings.

Let’s take the example of an employee in Washington DC who needs hip replacement. If the cost for this in a Washington hospital is US $ 50,000; and a hospital in India can do the exact same surgery using the same artificial hip manufactured by the same manufacturer , for US $ 10,000 wouldn’t it make sense to fly the employee down to India for this surgery ?

Health insurance brokers are very well positioned to be able to identify hospitals all across the world which meet JCAHO standards, thus ensuring safety, while saving money as well.

In fact, the quality of care at some of these “focussed factories” would be far better than what would be available in the “local” US hospital !

Smart patients are already taking advantage of the superb cost effective care medical tourism service packages offer them on an individual basis. Why don’t corporates learn from them, and make good use of these lessons ?

Suggested Reading : Jaipur Foot: Making people walk across the world (The article talks about the price differential of Jaipur foot and how it is becoming popular with global acceptance due to medical tourism)

This is a Guest Editorial reproduced by Kind permission of Dr Anirrudha Malpani. This article is not copyrighted under CCL.

Dr Aniruddha Malpani, MD is a Consultant IVF Specialist from Mumbai,India  and is the Founder and Medical Director, HELP, (Health Education Library for People) . He blogs at : http://blog.drmalpani.com/

Image Courtesy : Naciketa Datta under CCL

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post and the views/opinions expressed  in the article are solely that of the author.References and figures (if any) are not verified by the Editor for Guest Editorials. The incidents about patient experiences (if any) stated in this blog are highly fictionalised and any resemblance to any person(living or dead)and/or incident  is purely co-incidental.