I am happy to say that this is not true in Mexico. While yes, there are are people who are too poor to pay for college, it is entirely possible for poor people to go into the medical field with not that much effort.
I don’t know what this means.
I’ve met a lot of people that should know better. They don’t.
It wouldn’t matter, the US healthcare system has been compared to many other countries that are economically better off than Mexico and the lessons get dismissed.
“Trust but verify” is one thing, the real question is where do these expectations come from?
I believe it was Mark twain that said:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
An interesting piece that doesn’t get discussed is how Medical Tourism affects the locals. In Tijuana, dental work is relatively expensive in part because of medical tourism, you’ll be hard pressed to find a doctor that doesn’t expect payment in dollars even if you are Mexican.
Is it clear this is mainly about DENTAL work?
Not, ya know, primary care doc related ailments, right?
The main reason ‘insured’ people go to Mexico for dental work is: MEDICARE DOESN’T COVER DENTAL
And that’s also the main reason a noticeable number of patients are racist - because they’re old.
Now, some Medicare-Advantage plans do have dental for extra fees but lots of elderly folks don’t switch to those - plus there’s still co-pays and deductibles on big stuff so the Mexico prices could still be cheaper.
Sure, there are plenty of other people without insurance or merely without dental coverage that aren’t elderly - but it’s vast majority people over-65 doing this.
Oh, also Viagra. Cheaper+easy to get Viagra is there, too.
ps - there’s literally a Mexico/AZ border town nicknamed Molar City and it’s dentist shop after dentist shop packed in an about 3 block area (and several optometrists and pharmacies) with dental-office-specific street barkers everywhere you turn. It’s pretty great.
Especially useful for next century’s climate change exodus from the north. If Mexico can actually get them to pay for Mexico’s protection from invasion, that’d be a truly gorgeous irony to look forward to.
Clearly, that Mexicans have dark, pre-Columbian gods that have to be satiated with the souls of North American Christians, separated from them during these “medical” procedures, and in return the gods arrange for things to be cheaper in Mexico.
If the payment model is based on cash up front, that’s a relentless cost driver.
If you are running a dental clinic whose economics are based on attracting turistas who can pay cash, you’ll be spending money on everything that’s visible. New(ish) buildings, attractive and comfortable waiting rooms, gleaming new equipment, well-groomed staff in clean uniforms.
You won’t be spending money on things that aren’t visible. That well-groomed staff probably makes one-third of what a nurse or hygenist makes in the USA. There’s no liability insurer with deep pockets if things go wrong (I’d like to see the waiver that patients have to sign). The equipment can be bought outside the USA at a big discount because FDA approval is not an issue. Health and safety inspections may or may not be at the USA level. There are no employees needed to cope with the complexities of government or insurance billing because cash up front.
We could duplicate this model in the USA if we wanted to. If I had a few billion bucks sitting around I might try to do it on a native reservation, using the casino loophole to get out from under as many regs as possible.
But then again it might not work. This article is about a dentist. No mention of Americans going to Mexico for kidney transplants or long-term chemotherapy. Cory’s headline “high-quality health-care” has not actually pegged my clickbait meter, but it is definitely past the redline.
Once I heard a porn producer/director - Joanna Angel - asked whether porn was misogynist by nature. She said that like every art form porn was a product of the culture that made it. So if you live in a misogynist culture, then much of the porn will be misogynist.
Wondering where racist anti-Mexican approaches in US entertainment come from reminded me of that answer for some reason.
I think it’s actually all the greedy insurance companies. It’s not just Mexico where it is cheaper. A NYT article many years ago compared the cost of routine procedures on either side of the US/Canada border and found that in the US they are five to ten times more expensive.
The thing is, not that much changes when you header from Windsor to Detroit.
Insurers basically get a fraction of a percent of the value of whatever they are insuring every year. If car insurers got to negotiate the price of your car, the price of cars would skyrocket. In the US the price of healthcare is negotiated between insurers and providers, both of which make more money the higher the more your health is worth.
This is why it’s usually not good to ask is people are racists (noun) but instead to talk about racist words and actions (adjective). Some of our thoughts come from unchecked racist assumptions, but thinking of a person as “a racist” isn’t very helpful unless the intent is to write them off completely.
If you think that somewhere in Mexico there is a dank back-alley dentist office that is home to a doctor of quesitonable credentials, I’d tend to agree that’s probably true. I bet those places exist in America too. But if my first assumption was that a G20 country wouldn’t also have well credentialed doctors working out of nice-looking offices with state-of-the-art equipment, I’d probably would stop and ask myself where that belief is coming from.
Dental malpractice insurance in the U.S. is shockingly inexpensive compared to insuring general or specialized practice of medicine.
As an aside, I’ve had occasion to go to Guadalajara for business a dozen + times over the past few years. Based on conversations with fellow Delta passengers (Some of them mountains of muscle), there is a thriving sports medicine clinic in Guadalajara that pulls in athletes from around the states.
My best friend’s daughter has one year and change left to go in dental school here in Tijuana. She’s going to be a great dentist, I’m sure. The misconceptions about Mexico, especially from people who have lived all their lives just across the border in San Diego, are appalling.
In the early 90s, my mother chose to have some vascular surgery done in Guatemala at a private hospital, despite having employer sponsored US-based health insurance. The surgeon was US-trained, the facility was excellent, but the biggest difference was in the amazing post surgical care with round-the-clock, dedicated convalescent nurses and no rushed hospital discharge.
She paid out of pocket up front and then submitted the claim to her insurance company for reimbursement. Of course they denied it at first, but she brought the employer into the negotiation and showed the net savings of her going outside the system. Since the employer was self-insured and the insurance company only administered the plan, they did eventually reimburse her for most of the cost.
If we need to lower the cost of living so that we can cut the salaries of American nurses, lab techs, EMTs etc to Mexican levels, then health care reform here is going to be a bigger problem than many think.
Could be. It might provide 95% of the safety testing in the USA at 20% of the cost. Here in the States, we like to chase the tiniest risk margins, irrespective of thal ol’ devil the law of diminishing returns. Comforting, but costly.
That’s almost always elective, and not life saving. It attracts cash paying patients north of the border too.
A lot of which is pure woo, and thus not available in the USA. (I’m not against the FDA when it deals with absolute bullshit non-cures, I do think their process could be edited to cut delay and cost (see: Epipen, Martin Shkreli)).
You may be under the impression that I was attempting to rebuff every single one of your points and that’s not something I’m interested in.
It’s hard for me to put this in words. I want to remain respectful, but the assumptions you make about Mexico are not new to me, I’ve seen them time and time again and they do not come from a respectful place.
And I would like to address these assumptions, but I really do think you are blind to them, I see that in your comments.
You just said that well-groomed staff in clean uniforms are only there to attract foreign clients. This comes from a nakedly racist worldview. The kindest way to take this comment is to say that you are using hyperbole to push an agenda, but that does not make it any less a racist statement.
I can believe you personally are not someone who openly pushes racist agenda or that you have any personal interest in continuing racism, I can also believe you personally are against racism. But these assumptions you make have at the heart of them a contempt born of ignorance, which is the heart of racism, I don’t expect you to know what Mexico is like, but why must you assume that clean uniforms are the exception? Where did you get that from?. Like I said, there is so much wrong with this I can’t even…
I get it, you as an American doubt that high quality healthcare is possible in Mexico, (Insert Fry shocked/well not that shocked gif here) but that’s your problem to deal with, you have to deal with the very idea that your standards are so high people can’t afford them and rather than live in pain they’ll come here. That’s on America as a whole if not down to you personally.
We do need to address a lot of issues in our medical system, I don’t care to go into this with someone who would potentially start the conversation by suggesting we might want to start by making sure our doctors wear clean uniforms, or worse, make it just like the American system.
As for the rest of your points, if you are under the impression that I am comparing The US vs Mexico’s healthcare system let me assure you that I am not doing anything nearly so stupid.
I can still remember sitting in the car with my SO’s mother as she conversed with his sister. She was describing a thrift shop with clothes so worn that even mexicans (myself and my family!) wouldn’t want them.
Unfortunately I was younger and then and didn’t say anything. This is one of many anecdotes I could share from my past. Racist assumptions about Latin people in the US run deep.
A Mexican owned company I worked for a few years back bought out an American competitor. One of the US Managers came down to Tijuana for some training. As we were having a team lunch the conversation turned to cars and what our dream cars would be, as one of my colleagues mentioned a Jeep or some other terribly uninteresting car (all cars are uninteresting to me, cars are not my thing), he casually says: “I guess that’s what passes for a luxury car around here”, at that very moment, outside the window we could see a Mercedes Benz and a couple of other nice cars roll by.
He was also surprised to find paved roads and an airport.
It’s weird looking straight at a person who is shielded from their own callousness and general shittiness by a layer of assumptions so thick that they can’t trust what they see with their own eyes. Knowing that no argument will cast doubt on their worldview, no belief will be touched by fact.
I’m not personally touched by this everyday, but I do have family over there (legally if it needs to be said at all) who are. It feels awful to know you can’t do anything for them but yell at a few strangers on the internet.
It’s the kind of thing I see with many tourists who never make it further south than Zona Rio in Tijuana, or further east than Ensenada. Dipping your toe in the water at the edge of the ocean does not equal swimming from Cuba to Florida.
I have an acquaintance who works in the state parks near the border in Arizona who calls vacation areas in Mexico “tourist internment camps”.
Many of the Americans and others who go to Mexico for plastic surgery and cancer “treatment” might as well be using homeopathy. I am sure there are many fine doctors in Mexico, but the Mexican government does not have a good record of dealing with outright quacks.
