Healthcare in the US is the highest cost in the world. Medicare and Medicaid are unsustainable. Outsourcing to countries with lower costs without sacrificing quality of care is an obvious solution whose time as come.
The City of Manizales and its world class healthcare providers are uniting to establish Manizales as a major destination for low cost, high quality surgeries and procedures.
There are literally millions of surgeries and procedures which could be performed in Colombia at savings up to 70 %. Let´s just look at a couple opportunities of low risk, high volume procedures with very high cost differentials.
There are about 790,000 total knee replacements and 544,000 hip replacements are done every year in the U.S. This number continues to grow as our population ages. Total joint replacement is one of the safest and most reliable treatments in any area of medicine. A hip or knee replacement can last for 20 or more years. In fact, for most patients, total joint replacement surgery is a lifelong solution for arthritis of the hip or knee.
The average cost for these two procedures is about $40,000 versus $8,000 in Colombia. So 1.3 million replacements at a $32,000 savings equals $42.7 billion USD.
Of course, Colombia doesn´t have the capacity to do 1.3 million knee and hip replacements but it could ramp up over the years to do a big chunk of them. There are many other countries like India and Mexico too.
Bariatric surgery is another major opportunity. The cost in the US for this simple 1.5 hour surgery averages $19,000 to $23,000 for gastric sleeve or gastric bypass, respectively. The all inclusive cost (including airfare) in Colombia for a 11 night stay is about $7,000; a savings of $12,000 to $16,000.
Over 100 million US adults are obese or overweight. Yet only about 250,000 a year choose bariatric surgery. Millions are doing nothing to deal with this health care crisis that is a leading cause of many chronic diseases like diabetes type 2, and heart, liver and kidney diseases.
At least with hip and knee replacements, people who have insurance can get the surgery for very little out of pocket. However, there are millions who do not have insurance or rely on Medicaid (the state healthcare insurance program for low income).
Millions have insurance that covers bariatric surgery but the insurance companies (including Medicare and Medicaid) make it almost impossible to get it approved. So about 20,000 people a year go to Mexico or some place else and just pay cash.
The cost of obesity is staggering. While new weight loss drugs are promising, the reality is that they are very expensive, must be taken for life or you will regain very quickly all the weight you lost and they have serious side effects.
Bariatric surgery has been the Gold Standard for decades and is the low cost solution.
If you or a loved one is suffering and need help, contact us at:
Colombiabariatric.com or MBSWellnessCenters.com