Globalizing Health Care

HERE AT the Road to the Middle Class we are not so sure about the 15 percent of GDP spent on health care. When it comes to improving life expectancy, expensive bio-medicine isn’t exactly outperforming sanitation and baisc OB-GYN care to keep infant mortality down.

And then there’s the regulation and the licensure and the special interests, not to mention the herioc end-of-life care that doesn’t relieve suffering and doesn’t extend life.

So it’s good to see the chaps at Democracy Project doing a bit of thinking. They don’t like

the status quo or various extensions of the status quo such as proposals for a single payer system, mandating employee coverage, mandating employer coverage, health spending accounts[.]

Everyone, Democrat and Republican, wants to give the present system a few tweaks. But nobody is thinking big ball.

The problem with our health care system is over-regulation. Yet, all the Republican solutions and Democratic solutions involve extending or reshaping the regulation.

Why not sidestep regulation altogether?

This can be accomplished through overseas medical treatment.

What, medical tourism, risking life and limb in third-world countries? Well, not so fast.

Back in the 1950s, many Americans believed that goods "made in Japan" were of low quality. As it turned out, by the 1970s "made in Japan" meant better quality than U.S.-manufactured goods. There is no reason why health care can’t be provided in the third world.

What makes you think that medical care in say, India, won’t be competitive with the US in 10 years or so?

The beauty of it is that it would force the US health care industry to start cutting costs and improving quality. Just like the US auto industry had to do.

We’ll find out, along the way, just how privileged and subsidized our vast health industry has become. And we can expect our doctors and nurses and adminstrators to go screaming to Congress for relief from medical “dumping.”

But we won’t pay a blind bit of attention to their screeching.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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