Medical Tourism for your Spine

An affordable health-care option

What does an average-at-best writer write about when they can’t write? That’s obvious. They write about the reason they can’t write. That means you get to learn about back surgery South of the border.

It’s December 2020. I’m a third of the way through the second book in my South American adventure series. I’m making great progress lampooning apps and lawyers. From nowhere, I get a Pompeiian sense that something is wrong. I need to run away, but I’m frozen in place. My L-5 vertebrae just went Mt. Vesuvius.

It’s from sitting and writing. I know it. I’ve never had a sit-down job, so that has to be it. It can’t be a lifetime of football/wrestling/baseball/water skiing/snow skiing or playing massively violent pool basketball as a kid. It has nothing to do with my middle-agedness. It’s the chair. ’Cause science.

But, I’m in Latin America. That means I can’t sue Wal-Mart or the Chinese manufacturer. Sovereign though our lawyers think our system is, we don’t hold dominion over the planet. So I’m stuck taking responsibility. I can either lie face-down or stand. That’s it. Everything else feels like I’m the target at a Roman javelin competition.

Once a few toes went numb, I realized I was in trouble and crawled to my neighborhood Latino orthopedist. So what does major medical look like in Latin America?

First off, I have insurance with a private hospital, so this isn’t the state-run system. Insurance runs me $360 a year. That isn’t a typo. That covers roughly 80% of the hospital costs plus a variety of low-level dental stuff. An MRI runs me $400, just for comparison. Overall, the setup down here is sort of 70s US healthcare in that you pay the hospital for their elements, and the doctor gets paid separately for his expertise and time. We’re just talking big stuff here, not for every little adventure you take to the hospital. The US did this back in the day before insurance companies took control.

Like all middle-aged guys, I wasted some precious weeks at the Chiropractor attempting to will myself into my 30s, back when back-cracks could solve my nagging issues. But like the Romans at Pompeii, I learned that you just can’t outrun nature.

Visit 1: Monday. I drag myself, medicated on painkillers, OTC without prescription, to the doc. Thank the Lord I’m not in the States. He does some standard poking and prodding, laughs, and sends me to get X-rays. He looks at the X-rays, shows me where my disc should be, then sends me for MRI. Total time about 2.5 hours and $450.

Visit 2: Tuesday. We go through the MRI and he explains my surgical options. He calms me down about the toe numbness, admonishes me for waiting a month to see him, then asks me what I want to do. I choose the discectomy over the disc-fusion surgery. He laughs and says he will see me in 5-years, but he understands why I’m hesitant to do the fusion. He quotes me his price ($2000) and calls my concierge (included in my insurance) to tell them to work up a quote. The quote comes in that evening. $500 to the hospital.

Wednesday. I text the doctor…the actual doctor, not his assistant’s secretary’s brother’s insurance carrier. I tell him we’re well good to go.

Friday. I go back to get blood work to clear me for surgery. I do the tests, I go home. 1 hour, $30. I get a text from my concierge that surgery is scheduled for….

Tuesday.

This Tuesday. Not five Tuesdays from now. I’m not on a Tuesday waiting list.

This. Tuesday.

Remember, December was late-stage pandemic. People in the US were having these exact surgeries canceled because they weren’t deemed necessary. I know of a person who had the same issue in the States. He suffered a permanent loss of the use of three fingers because his surgery got pushed off. As a side note, imagine how miserable that round of lawsuits is going to be? If you thought infrastructure spending was high, wait until you see a lawsuit-stimulus bill.

Anyway, the hospital emailed me all the list of do’s and don’ts, a map of where to go, where to park, stuff I’d need in case I stay overnight, etc.

Tuesday, I walk into the hospital at 5 a.m. Very nice people greet us and show us to our private suite. There is a fold-out couch, a bathroom big enough for pod-racing, a TV, and a view of the air-conditioning condensers…typical hospital stuff.

After an antibacterial shower, I’m wheeled into a room where a nice woman puts a needle in my arm. She’s funny. She told me, in Spanish, that I looked like….

I wake up in the recovery room with nurses passing back and forth. They check on me a few times, focus my brain, then wheel me to my room. The rest of the night is spent waking up every hour changing bags of antibiotics and painkillers.

Does all this sound familiar? It should. It’s exactly how it would have been handled in the US.

Apart from the cost, here is a funny difference. When I checked out, they gave me a 12-page itemized bill of what everything cost; right down to a box of gauze. Since I only used half the box and half bottle of iodine, all that stuff was placed in a nice gift bag for me to take home. So while it is odd that I have ½ a bottle of iodine, I did pay for it.

4 days post-op, zero pain. 3 months post-op and I’m back in the gym 4-days a week. It’s basically like ServePro came in and cleaned my spinal discs…like it never even happened.

So my point? The US still has amazing medical technology, amazing doctors, and great high-end healthcare. But they don’t have a corner on the market anymore. You can get excellent healthcare in other places now, and no, you don’t have to be Donald Tr…oh, wait, we can’t use that anymore. You don’t have to be Bill Gat…wait, I think that’s bad, too. Okay, you don’t have to be a billionaire. The surgery ran me about $3,000 all-in.

Here are a couple of questions. How can a surgery that costs $3k here, cost upwards of $20k there? Same outcome, same equipment. Fewer bureaucrats I guess? In a lot of ways, I compare it to the U.S. legal system. If you have the money to get to an outcome, you’ll probably be happy. If you don’t? Well, I’ve got extra Iodine I’m not using.

For additional information about life outside the US, see my previous article, The Math Behind Early Retirement.

Victor Adams is a retired franchisee, independent business owner, and Siberian husky breed snob. He is the author of the satirical adventure, The Last One Out, available on Amazon.