A Personal Note Involving Health Care

If you read my blog post on March 2nd, I made reference to a Howard Fineman column in Newsweek about his experience with the health care system in Argentina. In the post, I mentioned that I would have a more personal note later. Well, this is later.

I'm assuming most of you reading this post are friends of mine that are seeing this in your Facebook News Feed. (If you don't know me and just stumbled across it, thank you for reading.) As many of you know, my father passed away in January while he was vacationing and visiting relatives in India. He had been hospitalized with a lung ailment in December and was in the hospital for 26 days before passing away.

What Howard Fineman shares about the cost of his experience is similar to what my family encountered. He mentions that the cost of the services he received was approximately $1,500 when converting from Argentine Pesos to US Dollars. Similarly, the cost of the services my father received, after converting from Indian Rupees to US Dollars, was roughly $8,600 to $8,900, depending on the exchange rate you use for conversion.

This seems like a sizable amount but consider the fact that this includes 26 days in one of the top hospitals in India, Poona Hospital and Research Centre, all antibiotics, medications, IV's, a ventilator in the ICU for his final six days, cable television, and a private room with a guest bed for my mom to sleep at night. The hospital also had staff to scrub, clean, and disinfect every room top-to-bottom twice each day and there were always two attending physicians on the floor and a fully staffed nurses' station around-the-clock. And this was in the standard room! The upscale/VIP/high-end floors were supposedly much nicer than this. And, unlike Howard Fineman's experience, all of the doctors and nurses spoke fluent English and those that were not native Marathi speakers spoke enough of the local language to get by.

Frankly, it is experiences like my family's and the one Howard Fineman writes about in his column as to why medical tourism is not only becoming more prevalent, some people are actually finding it cheaper even with insurance coverage that they have.

I personally know the doctor that was treating my father as they were good friends. (In fact, my father had left instructions to give his friend an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label that my dad had purchased to ease his friend's guilt if he could not save my dad's life.) The doctor lives very well, has a great practice, and often visits the United States for medical conferences at his own expense. He is not someone that is just wealthy in India but would only be middle class in the United States.

I'm not sure if the health care reform being considered by Congress will immediately rein in costs. I would imagine that goal is the provisions would lead to the lowering of costs over the years but it still begs the questions Mr. Fineman asks in his piece: where does all that extra money go?