America's medical refugees flock to India

Uninsured Americans are sojourning to India to get life-saving surgeries they can't afford back home. These aren't medical tourists looking for a cheap tummy-tuck -- they're medical refugees whose lives will be ruined or ended if they don't get out of the USA. It's funny, I used to have great travel insurance in the UK through BUPA, but they wouldn't insure me while I was spending a year in the US -- health care here is too screwed up for them to promise to cover my medical bills.

Kathleen Schneiderwind is one patient who was desperate to get rid of the lightning bolts of pain shooting through her spinal cord. But she and her husband lost their health insurance when they retired, and the hip-resurfacing surgery doctors promised would help cost $30,000 in the United States.

Schneiderwind and her husband, both in their late 50s, didn't have that kind of money, and the thought of so much debt was scary. So they began searching for alternatives.

"We began to look at places outside the United States and traded e-mails with doctors in Turkey and India. It turns out that the doctors in Bombay were both more experienced in this particular surgery and would only charge a fraction of what we were going to have to pay at home," said Barry Schneiderwind by phone as he sat with his wife who was recovering at Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai.

Not only has the treatment been first-rate, they say, they have been able to pay for their plane tickets and even get some dental work and a vacation in Goa for $10,000.

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