price of Medicare to travel to Cancun and operate on her knee.
"Ferguson gets her health coverage through her husband’s employer, Ashley Furniture Industries. The cost to Ashley was less than half of what a knee replacement in the United States would have been. That’s why its employees and dependents who use this option have no out-of-pocket copayments or deductibles for the procedure; in fact, they receive a $5,000 payment from the company, and all their travel costs are covered.
"[Surgeon] Parisi, who spent less than 24 hours in Cancun, was paid $2,700, or three times what he would get from Medicare, the largest single payer of hospital costs in the United States."
"NASH [Parisi's employer that organizes his work overseas] buys additional malpractice coverage for the American physicians, who could be sued in the United States by patients unhappy with their results.
“In the past, medical tourism has been mostly a blind leap to a country far away, to unknown hospitals and unknown doctors with unknown supplies, to a place without U.S. medical malpractice insurance,” said James Polsfut, the chief executive of NASH. “We are making the experience completely different and removing as much uncertainty as we can.”
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Our cost structure for health care in the US is out of whack.
Link: https://khn.org/news/to-save-money-american-patients-and-surgeons-meet-in-cancun/?utm_campaign=KHN%3A%20First%20Edition&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=75581998&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_PYYBPhfGm9H4I49AibandBIyyg-b8Yiq6-IcROVkPpdTulpAb2W6-ZOkoOgNH