Posted on 07/19/2009 10:19:03 PM PDT by Scanian
I once had a minor medical procedure done in Mexico. The doc wanted to be paid in cash, and I obliged. Then I asked for a receipt. What followed was Keystone Cops. It took a while for me to realize I was being stupid. By asking for a receipt in the double economy of Mexico I was asking the doc to sign a confession to the tax police. He was right, I was wrong, and I learned something about the underground economy in socialized medicine.
Welcome to Mexico, friends, where the people are warm and wonderful, the drug gangs ruthless (but mostly gun for each other), and the medical profession is a sign of things to come in the US of A. Rich people get pretty good medical care in Mexico. Poor people? So-so to dreadful. Same thing in Italy, and most of the Left-dominated world. Want to get pretty good medical care in Russia? How many dollars you got?
The trouble with socialized medicine is that it corrupts the doctors. They start living a double life. So do the patients. And irony of ironies, it doesn't hurt the rich one little bit.
If ObamaCare is given the bum's rush through Congress in the next couple of weeks, first thing I'm going to do is check out medical travel. Hong Kong has first-rate hospitals, inspected and rated by the British Health Authority. Israel has more qualified doctors per square inch than New York City. Taiwan, Singapore, the big cities in India, Thailand, the Philippines. Eastern Europe is heading that way. If they provide excellent care at lower cost than the US, it can only grow. Nobody in Congress has repealed the laws of supply and demand.
Want to build a great new business? Go into the medical travel game.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I had emergency surgery in Mexico and while the hospital conditions were less than desirable, the surgery and hospital stay only cost $10.00.
As soon as I arrived back in the States, I went to my regular doctor to be checked out and had to pay $100.00 for her to simply tell me that the Mexican doctor did a great job.
China is the new hot spot of affordable medical procedures. They pick you up at the airport with english speaking assistants, take you to a comfortable hotel, shuttle you to a well equipped modern hospital for surgery, and get you back to the airport after recovery to fly home. All for a fraction of what it costs stateside for comparable care.
I totaled my airplane in Mexico and the care given the 5 doctors and nurses that were my passangers was excelent.
Didn’t we do a rescue on Grenada to save our med students? Oh, I could recuperate in the Caribbean nicely.
Huh?
real simple, they were taken by ambulance from San Blas to the Hospital in Las Mochas and received excelent care.
Medical Research, wherever it happens in the world is done for the American market and no other because no other will pay for it, the other systems are all socialized, already. The American market and patent protections make medical R&D profitable, thus possible, for whoever does it. Those unconscionable prices we have to pay for protected drugs while they enjoy that status is what keeps those greedy drug companies doing R&D. Without it they can't do it. The government will not do it.
The government will initiate a crash program at some point in the far future when it is obvious that the rulers, too, can't get antibiotics. The government, being utterly short-sighted, will not continue R&D once it is responsible for the system entirely. That late entry into the field will be at a time when the economy has been declining steadily for maybe 30 years from its pre-socialization peak (socialization will not stop at Medicine. It has already made very rapid and deep inroads in Finance and Manufacturing). The government will not be able to mount an effect R&D program for new antibiotics to save the health of the Ruling Class because the resources will simply not be there. It will be back to 1900- you get sick, you die. Perhaps India will go totally small government and free market and medical R&D will return. Perhaps.
Great service at a great cost. It was not in a socialist nation (like the USA). I cannot recommend it more highly. Sadly, a lot of Americans will be forced into this mode, too, and many lining up for passports to go overseas to have things done, that they would never have dreamed of 10 years ago.
bump
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