Bangkok Heart Hospital coronary bypass surgery special
Bangkok Heart Hospital is advertising a special price on bypass surgery. Now through September 30, 2011 the advertised price is 395,000 baht. It takes a call to their call center to get all the details – there are none in the print advertising that is running in the Thai newspapers about his offer. The hospital is part of the Bangkok Dusit Medical Services group that owns all the Bangkok Hospital branches throughout Thailand.
The idea of advertising a special on bypass surgery might seem a little odd, but for patients who know they need it but haven’t yet scheduled it this would seem to be a good time to look into the details of this special offer. Bangkok Heart Hospital has has an exceptional reputation for treating cardiovascular disease and constantly boasts about having state-of-the-art facilities and highly trained doctors and staff.
Price comparisons with the same procedure in the west are a little difficult due to a number of factors. First is that there are different levels of complexity in cardiac bypass surgery. In addition, the costs in western countries are obscured or distorted due to the tangle of different insurance and entitlement programs with different benefits and deductibles. If you consult the Healthcare Bluebook you see that the “fair value” of coronary bypass surgery is about US$62,000, including physician, hospital and anesthesia services. But many times people pay much more than that, well over US$100,000. And then the insurance and medicare benefits pay for part of it. Taking one real example, a man in Houston had bypass surgery in 2006 that cost US$169,000 where Medicare paid US$135,000 leaving him to pay US$34,000 out of his own pocket. That compares to approximately US$14,000 out of pocket for this procedure at Bangkok Heart Hospital. In general we have seen the coronary bypass surgery costs about 1/10 as much in Thailand as in the U.S.