Worries grow as healthcare firms send jobs overseas

[Newsjock]

Source: Los Angeles Times

After years of shipping data-processing, accounting and other back-office work abroad, some healthcare companies are starting to shift clinical services and decision-making on medical care overseas, primarily to India and the Philippines.

... Outsourcing such tasks goes beyond earlier steps by healthcare firms to farm out reading of X-rays and other diagnostic tests to health professionals overseas. Those previous efforts were often done out of necessity, to meet overnight demands, for instance.

But the latest outsourcing, which have contributed to the loss of hundreds of domestic health jobs, is done for financial reasons. And the outsourcing of nursing functions, in particular, may be the most novel — and possibly the most risky — of the jobs being shifted.

At the forefront of the trend is WellPoint Inc., one of the nation's largest health insurers and owner of Anthem Blue Cross, California's biggest for-profit medical insurer.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-healthcare-offshore-20120725,0,5854713,full.story

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[Scuba]

2. K&R

[progressoid]

3. for-profit medical insurer

And there-in lies on of the problems.

[ananda]

4. Here's the crazy upsidedown backwards lookingglass sentence.

"Some experts argued that sending jobs abroad could help U.S. companies by enabling them to tap global talent and efficiencies, making them more profitable. When U.S. companies are stronger, the thinking goes, it creates more opportunities for American workers. Also, shifting operations to lower-wage countries can help consumers by holding down prices."

This is designed to appeal to the stoopid.

[pampango]

7. Reich: Problem is business' profits no longer connected with well-being of most Americans.

The core problem isn’t outsourcing. It’s that the prosperity of America’s big businesses – which are really global networks that happen to be headquartered here – has become disconnected from the well-being of most Americans.

Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital is no different from any other global corporation — which is exactly why Romney’s so-called “business experience” is irrelevant to the real problems facing most Americans. Without a government that’s focused on more and better jobs, we’re left with global corporations that don’t give a damn.

But low wages aren’t the major force driving Apple or any other American-based corporate network abroad. The components Apple’s Chinese contractors assemble come from many places around the world with wages as high if not higher than in the United States.

More than a third of what you pay for an iPhone ends up in Japan, because that’s where some of its most advanced components are made. Seventeen percent goes to Germany, whose precision manufacturers pay wages higher than those paid to American manufacturing workers, on average, because German workers are more highly skilled. Thirteen percent comes from South Korea, whose median wage isn’t far from our own.

http://robertreich.org/post/27527895909

[closeupready]

12. Same tired bullshit we hear from conservatives when Americans get screwed.

It never works out that way, but they continue trying to brainwash people.

[Brickbat]

5. I'd like to think that this is what finally sparks the outrage, but people didn't care when their

name-brand clothes, 100-year-old-trademarked appliances, baseballs, hockey sticks, and tax document storage went to China and India. So I think they'll swallow this too.

[TBF]

6. We need to take the profit out of healthcare - universal care NOW. nt

[ananda]

9. Exactly.

Take the insurers out of the picture!

[global1]

8. Outsourcing Of Nursing Functions - Really?.......

So the next time I'm in a hospital - a nurse from the Philippines will be taking care of me from Manilla? Cone

[nashville_brook]

10. so, cheap drugs imported from India are TOO DANGEROUS, but cheap nursing labor isn't.

This has got to end.

[TwilightGardener]

11. I assume the next step is to have $5/hr Indian/Filipino nurses watch

live streaming video of American hospital units and direct $10/hr American "patient care techs" on everything that needs to be done. Right there, they just saved $10/hr on nursing staff! Srsly, though, I had been considering going into coding or transcription, but that's already on the way out.