Mexican medicine

Dorthea, 72, a retired bank teller, lives in Harlingen, Texas, a city of about 67,000 in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley. Like a lot of Texans, she's crossed the border to Mexico a few times to buy cheap medication. But she'd never considered undergoing complicated medical procedures there—at least, not until she was quoted the prohibitive price of $30,000 for a gastric-band procedure, a treatment for obesity in which a band is placed around the stomach to limit food intake. It wasn't covered by her insurance, so Dorthea, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, opted to drive south and pay less than $10,000 for the outpatient operation at an American-owned hospital in Reynosa, Mexico, 10 minutes over the border and about an hour from her home. The outpatient surgery was a success, and she's planning on returning for follow-up care. "It was very good treatment," she says.

Medical tourism, which used to be mainly for elective surgery, and aimed at people who could afford weeklong trips to Brazil, is becoming an increasingly viable source of more basic health care for some of those sidelined by the insurance system in America, where 47 million people are uninsured and many millions are underinsured. Now, Americans like Dorthea who live along the Mexican border are driving and even walking south in search of treatment that can cost half or less of what it does in the United States. In response, American hospital chains are starting to buy into Mexico; Dallas-based CHRISTUS Health has built six hospitals in Mexico, including the Reynosa facility Dorthea visited, through its partnership with a Mexican chain. Most of its doctors are Mexican with Mexican medical degrees.


Comment: Just remember the saying (which holds true here) "You get what you pay for."
Maybe you should talk to those individuals, who have developed complications and unable to get the necessary follow-up care in Mexico. Just ask this same group how much money they had to pay out of pocket (100% that is) to correct the complication.
Maybe you should talk to those individuals horrified to find out the "nurse," who really was NOT a nurse, took "care" of them.