companies sending employees to other countrys for health services

[donsu]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0816/p03s03-usec.html


Companies explore overseas healthcare
To cut its insurance costs, a US papermaker plans to let workers seek medical care abroad in 2007.


Carl Garrett, a paper-mill technician in Leicester, N.C., is scheduled to travel Sept. 2 to New Delhi, where he will undergo two operations. Though American individuals have gone abroad for cheaper operations, Mr. Garrett is a pioneer of sorts.

He is a test case for his company, Blue Ridge Paper Products, Inc., in North Carolina, which is set to provide a health benefit plan that allows its employees and their dependents to obtain medical care overseas beginning in 2007.

"It's brand-new and nobody's ever heard of going to India or even South Carolina for an operation, so it's all pretty foreign to people here," says Garrett. "It's a frontier."

Garrett's medical care alone may save the company $50,000. And instead of winding up $20,000 in debt to have the operations in the US, he may now get up to $10,000 back as a share of the savings. He'll also get to see the Taj Mahal as part of a two-day tour before the surgery.

His two operations could cost $100,000 in the US; they'll run about $20,000 in India.
-snip-
------------------------------


go ahead,tell me america isn't dead

[cspanlovr]

1. I wish I could tell you that, but I can't. This is pathetic.

[cap]

2. just wait till there are complications from the surgery...

also, not everyone adjusts to food overseas in third world countries very well. so there will be complications from tummy troubles.

Cant wait for the lawsuits to start happening.

[Warpy]

3. If you want to know what the real inflation rate in this country

has been over the last 30 years, look at healthcare. It's the one thing that is 100% made here, that can't be offshored (although most record keeping is now in India). There is no hiding the inflation by hiring people and paying them in cheap currencies. They have to be paid here in dollars.

Now look at what wages have done over the same period. Now look at wealth concentration during the same period.

That is the problem, kiddies. If you want healthcare, you'll have to correct the entire problem, and neither party has recognized it as a problem, much less realized something has to be done about it.

[Nite Owl]

4. And all those republican

doctors who didn't want a single payor health care system thought they were immune from outsourcing?