Us Companies Should Put the Wellness of Their Employees Before the Insurance Costs

U.S. Companies Should Put the Wellness of Their Employees Before the Insurance Costs

The term “medical tourism” was first introduced to the U.S. in order to help those patients with limited or no health insurance to receive a better treatment at a relatively lower cost. According to BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, an U.S. health insurance organization, a hip replacement surgery in the U.S. can cost $30,000 to $40,000 for uninsured patients, compared with about $9,000 in India and $12,000 in Singapore (Smerd, J., 2008). Apparently, this pioneering form of medical healthcare could indeed become one piece of encouraging news to those jobless people who did not have any other options left. However, with the skyrocketing insurance premiums and the plummeting economy nowadays, more and more U.S. companies tended to send their employees with medical needs overseas for expensive surgery just in order to cut down insurance costs, but such an action might seem to be unethical in that companies had overlooked the three following issues:

1. Overseas flights may adversely affect the result of the surgery.

2. Overseas healthcare institutions are inferior both in the facility and quality to those in the U.S.

3. Post-surgery treatments are difficult to continue.

Without taking these possibilities into consideration, the employer could not verify that the medical tourism was as much beneficial to the company itself as to his employees, which contradicted the basic business principle --- humanity.

Overseas Flights May Adversely Affect the Result of the Surgery

A. Time wasted on the flight can be essential to the result of the surgery.

As a common knowledge, an overseas flight usually takes one or two days, which can seriously be a determining factor to the results of some certain surgeries, especially for those “matter-of-life-and-death” emergencies, such as car accidents, or sudden cardiac arrest. These are highly expensive surgeries, which cannot bear to waste time over long-hour flights. On the other hand, in some normal emergency-aside cases, a two-day delay may still, in all likelihood, make the patients miss the best operation timing, further affecting the result of the surgery. For example, as for an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptured patient, the best coping strategy is to have the surgery in less than 24 hours after the injury, otherwise the recovering process will be much longer, much more painful and often accompanied with certain side-effects in the knee. Therefore, if surgeries are indispensable, then sooner is definitely better than later.

B. Environmental changes can be harmful to the physical status of patients.

Hypothetically, even