Union Disrupts Plan to Send Ailing Workers to India for Cheaper Medical Care
By SARITHA RAI
Published: October 11, 2006
BANGALORE, India, Oct. 10 — A few weeks ago, Carl Garrett, a 60-year-old North Carolina resident, was packing his bags to fly to New Delhi and check into the plush Indraprastha Apollo Hospital to have his gall bladder removed and the painful muscles in his left shoulder repaired. Mr. Garrett was to be a test case, the first company-sponsored worker in the United States to receive medical treatment in low-cost India.
But instead of making the 20-hour flight, Mr. Garrett was grounded by a stormy debate between his employer, which saw the benefits of using the less expensive hospitals in India, and his union, which raised questions about the quality of overseas health care and the issue of medical liability should anything go wrong....
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The union, the United Steelworkers, stepped in after it heard about Mr. Garrett’s plans, saying it deplored a “shocking new approach” of sending workers to low-cost countries as a way to cut health care costs. Its officials insisted that Mr. Garrett be offered a health care option within the United States.
Mr. Garrett, who works for Blue Ridge Paper Products in Canton, N.C., had volunteered to get his treatments in India in return for a share in the company’s savings. Blue Ridge now says it will find Mr. Garrett a treatment alternative in the United States and will offer the overseas option only to its salaried employees....
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The union’s resistance has brought to the fore a critical question in the path of the globalization of the health care industry — who is liable if something goes wrong in an overseas hospital? And underlying all this is the even more explosive issue of potential job losses in the American health care industry, in an economy already sensitive to the large-scale shift of jobs to cheaper overseas locations....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/business/worldbusiness/11health.html
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