Americans may face a dilemma on outsourcing when it comes to health care. With the spiraling cost of health care and health insurance, Americans whose jobs may have been outsourced to India, may end up going to India to get cheaper but high-quality medical treatment compared to their local hospital.

In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal did a feature on Apollo Hospitals Enterprises Ltd. in Hyderabad, which has treated some 60,000 foreigners over the last 3 years. It tracks a Mr. Terry Salo of Victoria, British Columbia in Canada, who faced an unbearably painful and long wait for hip replacement until he decided to get the surgery done last year at Apollo at a fraction of what it might have cost him in the United States or Europe.

“People need to know that there are other options out there,” says Mr. Salo, 54 years old, who was swinging golf clubs a month after the operation.

Not only does Apollo provide billing

and other services to American insurance companies and U.S. hospitals, it also

provides actual medical in-patient care to foreigners willing to take the chance, thus putting paid to naysayers against outsourcing jobs to India.

“The company has capitalized on the high cost of health-care administration in the U.S. and demands of patients elsewhere, for fast, inexpensive treatment,” says the Journal.

“In seeking to provide a wide range of services at a large discount to Western competitors, Apollo is yet another Indian company threatening jobs in the U.S. and other

countries. On the other hand, Apollo’s relatively inexpensive medical services have benefited patients from numerous countries,” thus creating the dilemma in the outsourcing debate.

“We’re showing that a field like medicine is very much a two-way street,” Apollo founder Prathap C. Reddy, 72, told Journal. “We can all grow from each other’s strengths.”

Founded in 1983, Apollo’s meteoric rise is being copied by other Indian private hospitals that are expanding to accommodate foreign patients.

Educational institutions in India are not just turning out IT professionals, they are also producing 20,000 doctors and 30,000 nurses are year, noted the Journal.

The prices Apollo charges for procedures are phenomenally less than those at American hospitals ($4,000 for cardiac surgery compared to $30,000 in U.S.) that India’s “medical tourism” is identified as a major growth industry by analysts and the Indian government.