Globalising Healthcare

The way of the Future?

Medicare is expensive and given the questionable efforts of Federal and State governments there's no way you can argue that it's anywhere near universal. There are long waiting lists for surgical procedures and dental care is pretty hard to come by in the public system.

On the other hand in countries like India, Western trained professionals operate world class facilities that provide procedures desperately needed here at up to 80% less than they cost here. The obvious solution is to take the money being wasted on people who aren't getting the procedures we need and outsource them to foreign countries, India and Cuba come to mind.

Calm down, I'm not advocating the destruction of Medicare or anything. All I'm saying is that we have waiting lists of people in desperate need of a product we can't produce enough of. Doesn't it make sense to look elsewhere for the same product at the very least till we can produce enough ourselves? Of course the fact that it's so much cheaper over there would mean that vastly more people could get the healthcare they needed and the burden on our system would be relieved. Even if the government paid for travel costs, the procedure and acommodation the unit cost would be much lower than in Australia.

Some people, probably AMA members would argue that Indians and Cubans can't provide the same healthcare standards as Australians, I mean look at the Indian population. This is a fair point, except we'd be paying them to provide the same standards and relying on the lower cost of living to keep the price low, and incidentally introducing an ongoing stream of foreign currency into their economy. Everybody wins, even Australian doctors aren't out any extra patients because the plan would only apply to a demand they can't meet.

All I'm suggesting is that the government make use of something that already exists in an example of mutually beneficial privatisation.