http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... money.html

Gist is that it's cheaper to send a patient abroad for surgery than it is for them to have it done here. Presumably because of £/Rupee price and cheaper standard of living there. I'd rather not but have had patients who've flown abroad for laser eye surgery for the cost of a plane ticket.

*Goes OT already* Everybody I know who's had laser eye surgery says the people carrying it out all wore glasses... I've also never understood why Specsavers and the like would take what is essentially a one-off payment and probably never see you again

IIRC it's been the case for quite a while that people were going elsewhere in Europe for operations. Some pretty serious stuff too like knee replacements. It generally was cheaper than having it done privately in the UK. 'Course if you can't afford to have it done privately (and a knee replacement in private health care is probably going to cost 'brand new car' money) you're stuck with the good old NHS.

Would be interesting if our new market friendly NHS decided to start sending people abroad because it was cheaper than getting work done in the UK. I'd imagine a few Conservative party donors wouldn't be very happy about that. It would be amusing to see Cameron trying to figure out a way to sell it as a bad thing without making his government look incompetent in the process.

I know quite a few people have gone to Prague to have major dentistry as it is (was) a lot cheaper

Actually it is better to send them abroad as there will be no hint of corruption as they will not have donated to a party.

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And they could stay the The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel.

And visit the Taj Mahal afterwards.

That's one view, another would be


http://www.economist.com/node/18833589
http://www.economist.com/node/13496367

The gist is that Indian healthcare providers have a whole free enterprise zone where rich world countries have old institutions. But they have a very poor client base, so to capitalise they have had to innovate. They don't have a huge amount of funding to build and equip their new hospitals, but they have the advantage that they aren't tied to decrepit old buildings. This means they have a real competitive market that rewards good business models (unlike the inevitably fraudulent internal market plans we get up to over here).

Likewise, they didn't have to deal with any equivalent of the American insurance lobby, nor a medical profession with the political clout of the BMA. Nor do they have to deal with patients who want every hospital large or small to do everything from A&E to pre-natal cardiothoracic surgery. Or MPs who demand that each other's hospitals lose such capacity, but never permit that for their own.

The successful outfits have profited by allocating capital much more efficiently than any rich world medical system. That's the key thing to get. It's not about exchange rates, nor even really how much doctors are paid. Efficient capital allocation is how the Japanese eclipsed our car industry, and we stayed eclipsed as their pay rose to match ours. Recent inefficiency of same is how their electronics industry has gone down the crapper. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21 ... ics_firms/

The NHS could free up a lot of resources for the treatment of both acute and chronic conditions if it adopted more efficient ways of handling routine stuff. Whether that happens in public or private facilities, in this country or on another continent, is not very important. While it seems intuitively more desirable for us to invest in closing crappy old facilities and building the new ones for the task right here, if vested interests won't permit it, then sending NHS patients abroad is probably the best move.