Senior fellow Charles Kenny's weekly Foreign Affairs column on outsourcing American health care.
From the Article
One of the few things that Republican and Democratic politicians in the United States can agree upon today is that their country can no longer afford Medicare and Medicaid. In 2009, the U.S. government's principal health-care entitlement programs between them spent $876 billion -- an expenditure about the size of the entire economy of Mexico. The Congressional Budget Office projects that those costs will continue growing at 7 percent a year for at least the next decade, considerably outpacing GDP growth. And as the costs of Medicare and Medicaid have ballooned, the programs have become an explosive political issue. On Tuesday, May 24, Democratic candidate Kathy Hochul won a decisive upset in a Republican-leaning New York congressional district in a special election that was widely viewed as a referendum on Republicans' ambitious plan to overhaul Medicare.
It's not just the entitlement programs, either. Total health-care expenditures in the United States in 2009 topped $2.5 trillion --18 percent of GDP. And the efficiency of all that spending appears pretty low. According to World Bank data, Costa Rica and the United States have the same life expectancy (79 years), but Costa Ricans spend only 16 percent what Americans spend per citizen on health services.
More... That statistic, however, suggests a possible solution -- or at least a partial one -- to America's health-care woes. Maybe Medicare's services don't need to be cut, overhauled, or saved. Instead, they should be outsourced. The U.S. government could save billions by simply letting its citizens go abroad for their federally funded health care.