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Offshoring Healthcare

The cost of medical care in the US is becoming so ridiculous it invites an absurd solution: fly Americans to hospitals overseas.

The congressional budget office (CBO) releases its updated long-term projections for Medicare and Medicaid this week. They will almost certainly show a frightening story.

Healthcare costs in the United States are expected to hugely outpace the growth in income and inflation. When these increases are projected out over 50 or 100 years, the picture is very frightening indeed. In fact, many prominent politicians and political pundits have made a career out of scaring the public with these projections, warning of long-term budget deficits in excess of $70tn (approximately 7% of future GDP). Of course the scare stories usually neglect to point out that the vast majority of the projected deficit is due to our broken healthcare system.

While healthcare costs pose a problem everywhere, the United States really does stand out in having an incredibly inefficient healthcare system. Although we spend more than twice as much per person as the average in other wealthy countries, the United States ranks at or near the bottom in life expectancy, infant mortality rates and other key outcome measures. This gap continues to grow year by year. If the long-term trend in healthcare costs in the United States follows the path that has been projected by CBO and others, then the gap between the United States and other countries will reach hugely astounding levels in the not very distant future.

This gap suggests one obvious way to deal with this projected explosion of healthcare costs. If our political system is too corrupt to allow for meaningful healthcare reform in the United States, why not just let people get their healthcare from systems that work?

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/67676/
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