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The globalization of health care. Alessandro Scancella Pierre-Yves Ecoeur Jean-Benoît Mulliez . What is globalization of health care?. It is a trade of: Goods: medicines, vaccines and other health technologies
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The globalization of health care Alessandro Scancella Pierre-Yves Ecoeur Jean-Benoît Mulliez
What is globalization of health care? • It is a trade of: • Goods: medicines, vaccines and other health technologies • Services: movement of health professional, patients, health related investments and supply of health care services across countries • Intellectual property • Dr Mirza, regional adviser for the world health organization, extracted from « the foundation for health and wellbeing international conference on primary health care »
Trade of professionals • Two main flows: • People from less developed country going to richer country to settle and graduate with professional credencies. • Richer countries recruiting people from poorer ones to face the demand. Example of Polish degree recognition in France
Trade of patients • Also called medical tourism, it is becoming a tendency to go abroad for surgery. • Quality of the service (example of American couples) • Price of the service (example of India or Hong Kong where a save of 85% can be reached) (the economist) • This represents 3 million people (rapport Deloitte” consumers in search of value” 2008)
Trade of Services • high level service (specialist that have been trained in place like US or UK; other country as Singapore have local medical school considered some of the best in the world) • Outsourcing: Diagnostic procedures as MRI scans,( ex… It is possible to send images over internet to Indian radiologists that could interpret then. A radiologist in India earn 1/10 of a US one) • Medical treatment (e.g...in 2007 750000 Americans left the US for medical treatment) • Remotely controlled long distance surgery
Trades of goods • tools • medical equipment (technologies) • Medicine ( but here we have more barriers across different country so different law)
From an ethical point of view… • Issues raised about medicines • The « always lower prices » idea is threatening the pharmaceutical labs. Some fake medicines factories have been discovered in China that were providing either non-working or harmful medicines. • The price of medicines is established by pharmaceutical manufacturers (GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis…) to ensure the R&D funding for research on other molecules. Lower prices means lower R&D funds and therefore a concentration on best-seller medicines (anti-fat pills for example)
From an ethical point of view… • Issues raised by the displacements of population • Citizens of countries where health care is « cheap » may be « over passed » by rich people from abroad • No a common framework about healthcare quality • Negative impact on employment in the health care sector of the rich countries who export their patients.