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Yes, they are very sheltered from outsourcing. Your examples are flawed even from a common sense perspective, let alone from an expert's perspective....medical outsourcing ...hmm, let's fly to india to get a vasectomy, and fly back to the US just to save some money. Never mind the risk of followup complications, time off from work, cost of airfare, non-liable foreign surgeons that can't be sued from the US easily if they do something wrong...what percentage of US medical expenditure is currently being spent overseas in your highly exaggerated medical-outsourcing scenario? What is the forecasted percentage? Your examples are not very credible since the public knows that it's not practical to go overseas for a risky elective procedure.
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<p>These examples are "my" examples? How's that? I didn't write the wikipedia article, other people did. And all you have to do is type in 'medical outsourcing' or 'medical tourism' into Google and you will come up with hundreds of links. Did I create all those links? Furthermore, I believe medical tourism had been featured on 60 Minutes. Did I make 60 Minutes run that story? </p>
<p>And let's talk about all of those points that you've raised. You talk about the legal aspects. Obviously any offshore medical company that is going to want to attract American patients is going to offer some sort of credible financial guarantee in the case of medical malpractice - i.e. putting up a financial bond or licensing themselves under a world-respected insurance company like Lloyd's of London or the like. It's no different from Indian offshore software companies agreeing to buy business insurance in case they write software that doesn't work. Secondly, what, do you think that American doctors never commit malpractice? Let's face it - there are some pretty darn shady American doctors. </p>
<p>Furthermore, let's talk about one of the major weaknesses in the American medical system - namely that not everybody is insured. Think of this. So let's say that you need a heart transplant, or you will die, and you have no insurance. Or let's say that you have insurance, but only up to a certain amount, and you can't cover your part of the cost. That's happened to many Americans. And here's some Indian medical company that will offer it to you for a price you can actually afford. So you might think that having the procedure done in India is risky. But hey, it's better than not having it done at all, which means sure death. At least the Indian company is giving you the chance to live. So let's see - the possibility of death vs. sure death. Which one would you prefer?</p>
<p>And why do you want to use the trivial example of a vasectomy? We both know that I am talking about things that are far more major, like breast implants. Breat implants generally take about 3-4 weeks to recover from. So what's another 1-2 days of travel time? How about a tummy tuck, something that generally takes 2-3 weeks of recovery. Plenty of other elective procedures take weeks to recover from. Hence, any 'extra' time for travel is trivial compared to the time of the recovery itself. </p>
<p>But again, hey, don't take my word for it. Why don't you go write to all of the authors of all of those sites and maybe also to 60 Minutes and to wikipedia and you can argue with them about how supposedly inpractical medical tourism is, and how all those Americans who have actually undergone medical tourism (and 60 Minutes found quite a few such people) are obviously lying about their experience. </p>
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Also, I hope you know that the AMA has explictly disallowed radiology readings by anyone other than a board-certified doctor. Did you know that?.... or are you just imagining that hospitals would break the law and send x-rays overseas?
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<p>And what did I say before about this very subject in the other thread? The doctor who signs off on the final diagnosis IS a board-certified doctor. It's just that often times, he himself is an Indian doctor who had went to a US medical school, is US board certified, and has now moved back to India. So tell me about how this is breaking the law? </p>
<p>Here's MSNBC talking about how it's done. If you don't like it, you can contact the authors and tell them they're wrong.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6621014/%5B/url%5D">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6621014/</a></p>
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BTW sakky, your sources are as cheap as your arguments...one is a wikipedia page that is publicly editible by anyone with a browser, and the other is blogsource. It doesn't get any less credible. You don't have any credible sources because what you're saying is flat out exaggerated. With engineering oursourcing, I can point you to TONs of articles by San Jose Mercury, NY Times, CNN.com and other equally <em>reputable</em> sources.)
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<p>Ok, you wanna play, let's play.</p>
<p>Here's CNN talking about medical outsourcing.</p>
<p><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/02/24/singapore.medical/%5B/url%5D">http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/02/24/singapore.medical/</a></p>
<p>Here's 60 Minutes talking about it</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/21/60minutes/main689998.shtml%5B/url%5D">http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/21/60minutes/main689998.shtml</a></p>
<p>Here's the Financial Times talking about it (reprinted in the Yale Global)</p>
<p><a href="http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=2016%5B/url%5D">http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=2016</a></p>
<p>I can come up with many many more, but I think that should suffice. That is, unless you are going to try to claim that CNN, 60 Minutes, and the Financial Times, and MSNBC are not credible. Heck, just go to any news aggregation site and type in terms like "medical tourism", "medical outsourcing", etc. and you will see for yourself.</p>