Sick? Visit the Taj Mahal

Sick? Visit the Taj Mahal
By Indrajit Basu

KOLKATA - Thomas Hiland, a Denver, Colorado, real-estate broker, was diagnosed early this year with a heart condition that required complicated valve-replacement surgery. Given that his ailment would have given him less than a year to live if left untreated, Hiland hardly looked like one who would travel thousands of kilometers to a developing country for surgery. But speaking from his hospital bed in New Delhi, Hiland said that from an American's perspective, "India is the best place in the world to have heart surgery.

"I had considered two hospitals in the USA first," said Hiland, "but they took three weeks to give me an estimate of about $140,000. Since my health-care insurance had lapsed, I found out that I would have had to wait for a year to get a new insurance carrier pay the cost. But my symptoms were progressively getting worse. I could neither wait that long nor afford the cost on my own."

That's when Hiland started doing research on the Internet about the possibility of getting treated outside the United States and chanced upon Delhi's Escort Heart Institute and Research Center, which claimed to be "one of the best health-care institutions in the world".

So Hiland sent an e-mail to Escort. "I remember sending the e-mail on a Friday evening, and within 12 hours I got a telephone call from Dr Naresh Trehan," the head doctor of Escort, said Hiland.

He said Escort offered him a total treatment package that included a visit to the Taj Mahal and other historic sights near Delhi at a price cheaper than wherever he had tried before. The valve-replacement operation, a luxury room in the hospital for 22 days, the return flight and the pleasure trip cost him about $14,000 - about one-tenth the cost he was quoted at home. Hiland said he had explored Thailand too, which he knew was another destination for cheaper health care, but "the best hospital there took longer to respond and quoted twice the price of Escort".

Hiland is one of the increasing tribe of patients in the West now taking advantage of the low-cost medical treatment in Asian countries such as Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and, more recently, India. Nearly 1.5 million patients from various parts of the world arrived in India for treatment in 2005; this year, that number could rise by 25%.

CONTD AT: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HF09Df01.html

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imagine that. a hospital paying such meticulous attention to one american, in a country where millions of broken, pauperized, haunted men, women and children crowd the smelly, understaffed, insolent, insensitive government hospitals every day, only to left to die by a health system that is creaking and looking for the slightest chance to fall apart.

the only difference between mr. hiland and these millions - is that the former's got dollars.

but i guess that's the way the cookie crumbles in the globalized world.

There's been a trend in Europe for most of the past fifteen years to seek specialist medical treatment in India, Eastern Europe and the Third World. At the moment, I have a friend who is getting cancer treatment in Cuba and another who's getting cataract surgery in Chennai (Madras). My mother-in-law got an amazing facelift in Estonia. In all cases, they're getting the best treatment available, regardless of where its offered.

Given that many doctors in the so-called third world are trained in the West, it should come as no surprise that they are returning home and creating centers of medical excellence in their home countries.

And before we get too sanctimonious about these luxury hospitals in the midst of squalor, many of them run extensive free health programs in local communities. Its not all it should be, but at least its a start.

its a start that will lead India to a mutant form of American capitalism -where everything is going to be exaggerated, including (and especially) the inequalities. 'free health programmes'(which consists of a tent with an intern spending 2 mins with each patient) is just grandstanding.

its plain wrong for 'centers of medical excellence' to chase dollars and thereby place profit over fellow country men and women.

sure, medical services and tennis shoes are both outsourced. but a doctor is not a shoe maker. nor is he a businessmen hawking human answering machines. his or her profession is on the line between livelihood and service, and his/her balance must always be titled towards the service part of the equation.

that's what i believe.

...I fear that the 'human sciences' will quickly become commodities over the next 50 years.

India is already deep in the throes of 'American capitalism.' Bangalore, Bombay, Hyderabad and Dehli are only the first outbreaks of infection. The djinn is out of the bottle and the challenge now is to figure out how to prevent him from destroying us.

While we jaded Westerners may appreciate the downside of unfettered capitalism, the entrepeneurs of India and China see only opportunity. That's the real crisis we face. And its only beginning.

curl up and die man. its only beginning.

I had participated in a seminar on development last year here in Delhi, in which a professor from england said that for the developing world to live like americans do, we would need EIGHT planet earths. and that just depresses the hell out of me, because we brownies in India ACTUALLY do want to live like americans do.

by the way, i'm pleased to have made your acquaintance.

Our biggest problem is that everyone in the world has a perfect right to live like Americans (or Europeans) do. Yet the planet can't sustain it. I've always believed this was a ridiculous injustice. Just because the West figured out how to consume all the planet's resources and pollute it beyond endurance before anyone else, the rest of the world should just sit back and say, "oh well, I guess we just missed the boat?" No way. If we truly mean that the Earth is the common heritage of mankind, we need to ensure that we give everyone the chance to catch up. If that means that America and Europe have to slow their development to give Asia and Africa the chance to pollute a bit themselves, so be it.

The future has to be one of united humanity. If we are divided, we die.

the rest have to attain their levels of consumption. like you said, we're in it together, and not at the expense of each other.

you know old man gandhi had the right idea about sustainability. we all gotta just lighten up and relax, pull our snouts out of the trough and smell the goddam air for a change. we must all return to a socio-economic system - a small village say - which promotes self reliance and a dignified prosperity that is never at the expense of the ecosystem within which the village exists.

no wonder gandhi has become a joke in today's india.

...but just thinking about the world you describe brings tears to my eyes. I really do believe that we can all live in an earthly paradise if we simply stop competing and start cooperating. I've had the good fortune to live in more than 70 countries, and I've fallen in love with every one of them.

I'm saddened that the Mahatma has become a joke in his home, but not surprised. Men of wisdom and conscience are considered mad in our world. The path to the future has been walked many times, but we are too cowardly to follow it. I wonder how many more times a wise person will have to burn themselves before the rest of us can see the way. Too many, I fear.

...that's a pretty good price for a 3-4 week trip with luxury accommodations.