Nine hundred dollar cure for Hepatitus C [View all]
Take a certain pill for 84 days and You are cured. But here each pill costs one thousand dollars. But the pill only costs $900 for 84 pills in India. So go to India, stay 84 days. Why doesn't Medicaid send Hepatitus C patients on all expenses paid vacations to India? Medicaid could save many many billions of dollars doing that. And India also has vastly cheaper surgeries in high quality "tourist" facilities with western trained doctors with results exceeding those in many American facilities. Why don't US insurers contract with such foreign medical centers for patients who are willing to be paid a piece of the cost savings?
Or alternatively why don't we impose an excess profits tax on US doctor wages? We draft doctors to go to war zones and pay them very low salaries. Why not draft them and make them treat US civilians at military pay rates? We have a health care cost crisis at least as threatening to us as the risks we face in middle eastern war zones.
US doctors get paid more than twice as much as doctors elsewhere. Taxpayers spend about a million dollars on the training each receives (taxpayers fund teaching hospitals, fund medical research, etc) so it seems fair to make them each limit what they charge. Once their reduced wages hit the million dollars we spend on their training, then they can go back to their "money or your life" extortion.
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