Health care costs too much, obviously, in the United States. And our recalcitrant refusal to be creative about ways to provide more than just emergency rooms for the 45 million uninsured has created a preposterous system in which the resulting costs (along with the cost of HMO red tape and ridiculous premium prices for patented drugs) are passed on to employers and employees. God bless America.
Or not. In California, there is a solution to the problem, or at least an effort afoot to make it less burdensome for corporations with a large number of insured, blue collar employees. No, it isn’t to get drugs from Canada. It is to send patients to Mexico. No kidding:
The [profiled family in this WaPo article the] Gonzaleses are members of a Blue Shield of California HMO that provides all of the family’s nonemergency care in Mexico. They are among 20,000 California workers and their dependents in health plans that cost 40 to 50 percent less than comparable care in the United States because the doctor’s visits are outsourced south of the border.
With health care costs in the United States continuing to rise, many employers in Southern California are turning to insurance plans that send their workers to Mexico for routine care, plans that are growing by nearly 3,000 people a year…Lower-priced labor, malpractice insurance and overhead in Mexico mean both basic and sophisticated medical procedures can be performed at a small fraction of the cost. A hysterectomy that averages $2,025 in the United States costs $810 in Mexico, said Mary Eadson, director of legal compliance for the Western Growers Association, an agricultural organization that provides health insurance for California workers in Mexico.