Companies explore overseas healthcare

Carl Garrett, a paper-mill technician in Leicester, N.C., is scheduled to travel Sept. 2 to New Delhi, where he will undergo two operations. Though American individuals have gone abroad for cheaper operations, Mr. Garrett is a pioneer of sorts.

He is a test case for his company, Blue Ridge Paper Products, Inc., in North Carolina, which is set to provide a health benefit plan that allows its employees and their dependents to obtain medical care overseas beginning in 2007.

"It's brand-new and nobody's ever heard of going to India or even South Carolina for an operation, so it's all pretty foreign to people here," says Garrett. "It's a frontier."

Garrett's medical care alone may save the company $50,000. And instead of winding up $20,000 in debt to have the operations in the US, he may now get up to $10,000 back as a share of the savings. He'll also get to see the Taj Mahal as part of a two-day tour before the surgery.

His two operations could cost $100,000 in the US; they'll run about $20,000 in India.

With US health insurance costs soaring, cash-squeezed companies such as Blue Ridge and poor states such as West Virginia are considering affordable plans that may require their employees to travel to India, Thailand, or Indonesia.

Critics say that limited malpractice laws in foreign countries makes such travel risky as well as the prospect of spending 20 hours on an airplane after invasive surgery. Despite the concerns, "medical tourism" is morphing into "global healthcare."

"Global healthcare is coming and American healthcare, which is pricing itself out of reach, needs to know there are alternatives" in order to improve, says Alain Enthoven, senior fellow at the Center for Health Policy in Stanford, Calif.

The average American hospital bill was $6,280 in 2004, twice that of other Western countries, according to the National Coalition on Health Care (NCHC) in Washington.

The cost savings have prompted a few hundred Americans this year to fly to India, Jakarta, or Bangkok for serious medical conditions, receiving heart stints and hip replacements. But most of the some 150,000 "medical tourists" nationwide go for a tooth filling or plastic surgery and a week at a sunny beach resort where the dollar stretches like lycra.

More companies – especially those with smaller company-run plans – are investigating people's claims of good overseas hospital care. The International Standards Organization in Geneva accredits these hospitals and audits American hospitals, too.

Companies are also attracted to the relatively inexpensive price tag for care at foreign hospitals, which have been reported to be up to 80 percent less than in the US. In New Delhi, for example, the Apollo chain of hospitals gives resort-style convalescence care for $87 a night.

•Insurers Health Net of California already contracts with medical clinics on the Mexico side of the US border.

•A West Virginia state legislator introduced a bill this year that would encourage state workers to seek treatment overseas using incentives such as cash bonuses and family travel.

•United Group Programs in Florida, which administers self-insurance programs for small companies, has contracted with a Thailand hospital for its employer clients.

•Inquiries from self-insured employers are brisk at IndUShealth in Raleigh, N.C., which specializes in offshoring serious medical cases such as rotator cuff surgery and gall bladder removal to India.

"We're dealing mostly with companies that are self-funded and have essentially run out of options," says IndUShealth president Tom Keesling. "It's an amazing trend, and it speaks to the tremendous frustration people feel with how to provide healthcare services in our current environment."

Blue Ridge Paper Products, which makes the DairyPak milk carton, pleaded unsuccessfully with providers for discounts for its 5,000 covered workers. In the past five years, the company established its own clinic and pharmacy. Blue Ridge decided to try overseas healthcare after it heard that hospitals "rolled out the red carpet" to American patients based on news reports and personal accounts from a North Carolina medical traveler brought in by IndUShealth.

"We want to help our company but also help to drive healthcare reform," says Darrell Douglas, vice president of human resources. "We're very much homebodies ... and the idea of going abroad for fun, let alone healthcare, is foreign to some people. But we do have some adventuresome people, and [Mr. Garrett] is one."

For critics, Americans heading overseas for care shows the severity of the country's healthcare crisis – especially as employers' health insurance premiums have risen 73 percent while average employee contributions have risen 143 percent since 2000, according to the NCHC. Rising costs stem from poor management, inefficiences, waste, fraud, and lack of competition, critics say.

"We're seeing some employers who are seriously beginning to think about doing [global healthcare] and not giving employees an option," says Joel Miller, vice president of operations at the NCHC. "And that has implications for quality of care, and what recourse people have if something goes wrong overseas."

Hospital officials say only a sliver of business will be lost to overseas providers. Yet going overseas for expensive medical services, such as heart bypass surgery, cut into US hospitals profit centers – such as heart units – that are used to underwrite emergency rooms and indigent care.

"[Global healthcare] will limit the amount of money that's available for everybody else to have access to the system and starts to jeopardize access to healthcare for everybody in the community," says Don Dalton, a spokesman for the North Carolina Hospital Association.

Garrett, meanwhile, anticipates movie-star treatment in India. Doctors will operate on his gall bladder and left shoulder, he says, and he will have a 24-hour nurse working only for him while he's recovering. Garrett's experience could affect whether Blue Ridge will proceed with its plan to give its workers the option of going overseas for medical care, the company says. "Everyone can see this thing could really become a big thing, so they're going to go out of their way to make sure everything is above and beyond the average in the United States," Garrett says.