How are American doctors fighting medical tourism trend?
Cardiologist DrRich’s latest post details the concern the American College of Surgeons have for the burgeoning medical tourism industry, and how they are using malpractice as a reason not to travel overseas for your procedure.
“Indeed, the potential difficulty in suing foreign doctors appears to be the chief differentiator, and the primary argument in favor of good-old-American-surgery,” DrRich write. “The surgeons, in essence, are saying, ‘Let us do your surgery, because we’re easier to sue if we screw up.’”
Trend? What trend? Tom Daschle:
[T]he myth in our country has long been that we have the best healthcare system in the world. Why else would kings and leaders all around the world, people of prominence come to the United States?
Well to a certain extent that is true. But for every king who may come to the United States, there are thousands of people who leave the US to get medical care elsewhere. They call it now medical tourism. Thousands of people leave the United States because the quality and the cost is better in other countries. So how do we explain, well we explain by simply stating that we have islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity.
We are 29th in the world when it comes to infant mortality. 29th. We are 24th in overall women’s health. We rank 31st in life expectancy. On Pine Ridge Indian reservation the life expectancy of an Indian male is 47 years. The same as what it is in Botswana. We rank 37th overall in outcomes. 37th. Below Costa Rica and just above Slovenia.
The KevinMD quote via Walter Olson at Overlawyered.