Obamacare may be Mexico's gain

After Obamacare, where will Americans go for quality care?
To Mexico, that's where.

The ink was still drying on the President's signature on the government takeover of American healthcare, when a notice went out from the Institute of the Americas at the University of California San Diego advertising a conference for April 21 entitled "The Future of Health Care for Americans in Mexico."

Mexico has always been the place where Americans can get whatever's banned in America. Alcohol during Prohibition (and underage drinking since), gambling before Indian casinos, Cuban cigars, power plants generating electricity for California that don't meet California environmental standards, maids and gardeners, illegal drugs. You get the idea. All along the border, Americans have always relied on Mexico to provide what we really want but publicly oppose.

Legal drugs too. In the debate a few years ago about prescription drugs, the availability of cheaper drugs in Canada was widely reported in the U.S., in part because the narrative fit the media template of extolling government-run healthcare as better and cheaper. Never mind the thousands of Canadians who come to the U.S. for treatment in a timely fashion—those stories didn't fit the template and were widely ignored.

But for decades, Americans near the Mexican border have traveled South to buy (much) cheaper prescription drugs. Given that it's Mexico, in the same way that Americans should be wary of the authenticity of the street vendor "Cuban" cigar, customers should check the prescription packaging carefully to detect tampering or dilution. But the same drugs and over-the-counter remedies available in the U.S. are available just a few miles away in Mexico for much less.

So too with medical care. Mexican dentists along the border do a land rush business from American customers. Many an eye glass wearer in El Paso bought those glasses in Juarez. Many an American women "on vacation" in Mexico is recovering from cosmetic surgery in a plush Mexican spa.

Medical tourism yields cleaner hospitals

"President Obama's worthy aims of universal and affordable medical care are achievable by bringing genuine free enterprise to the system, not more government.

Today there is a disconnect between providers and consumers. Almost all health insurance is covered by third parties--either insurance companies or governments--so patients rarely know what most health care services cost. If you go to a hospital and ask about prices, the staff's immediate reaction is that you must be uninsured. Why else would you want to know what something costs? Yet in just about every other aspect of our commercial lives the price of things is known.

No wonder health care doesn't experience the kind of productivity gains found elsewhere. For example, the cost of food as a proportion of one's income is a mere fraction of what it was decades ago. Twenty years ago cell phones were bulky and expensive; today they have become cheap virtual computers with easy access to the Internet. They even take pictures and videos. There are 4 billion cell phones in use around the world.

In 1900 the automobile was a toy for the rich and cost the equivalent of about $100,000 today. Henry Ford's moving assembly line turned autos into something that any working person could afford.

We could attain similar and ongoing miracles in health care. We are already seeing some in a few areas. Conventional Lasik eye surgery costs a third of what it did ten years ago. And there has been virtually no inflation in the prices of cosmetic surgery, even though there have been enormous technological advances, and the demand for these procedures has increased sixfold since the early 1990s.

Special hospital facilities in India, Thailand, Singapore and elsewhere that engage in medical "tourism" have infection rates a fraction of those found in most U.S. hospitals. These positive results are driven by the fact that patients write the checks and are thus fully conscious of the costs, as well as by the fact that providers are under pressure to make their offerings more enticing and affordable."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0803/opinions-steve-forbes-undermining-health-care_print.html