The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery

The difference between issuing passports and building a large-scale hospital is that only in the latter case is a large amount of money risked. It would be tricky to find a source of funding for a hospital that may not be able to operate due to a dispute over health law applicability.

From the perspective of anyone considering funding such a hospital, better to just locate in a nearby country, such as the hospital mentioned in the article that is being built in the Cayman Islands.

If you lined up all the words contained in US law, the median word would be health care related, that has to matter for something. Also AMA enforced under supply of specialists. Also direct and indirect costs of health care liability. Also requiring hospitals to serve the ER without regard to ability to pay. Also low reimbursement rates for medicare, lower for medicaid. Also third party payment system that makes consumers price insensitive. Also huge overhead to third party payment system. Also enormously expensive FDA approval process recovered through drug costs. Also service business in a high wage country. Any others for the list? I don't mean to be totally negative, we get a lot of good things out of all that inefficiency, but it doesn't surprise me that quality can be higher and costs an order of magnitude lower under a different regulator regime.

Presumably protectionism is helping him a bit. I doubt that his surgeons are licensed to practice in the US, regardless of their expertise! It's nice to see the AMA driving progress.

Actually, wikipedia makes it sound as though it is more socialized in India, compared with the USA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_India which makes sense given the historical British influence.

However, I think this sort of innovation was way more likely to occur in a developing country, regardless of if the individual or the tax payer is picking up the bill. It is a case of simple market forces as hinted in the article by:

On returning to India in 1989, Dr. Shetty performed the first neonatal heart surgery in the country on a 9-day-old baby. He also confronted the reality that almost none of the patients who came to him could pay the $2,400 cost of open-heart surgery.

"When I told patients the cost, they would disappear. They literally didn't even ask about lowering the price," he says.

Perhaps if somebody dies during open heart surgery in India their family doesn't sue the doctor for malpractice?

It was good to see the article mentioning that the quality/success rate is as good as the US.

> The US is unfortunately one of the highest spenders on health care with the lowest outcome per dollar spent.

Umm, no. The outcomes are actually quite good considering the population. (No, you can't just look a lifespan.)