Indian doctor Mukesh Tripathi removes stitches of American patient Dodie Gilmore after a successful hip operation at a hospital in New Delhi.

mustafa quraishi / The Associated press

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NEW DELHI, India — She's a rodeo barrel-racing champion who runs a 180-acre ranch in Oklahoma when she's not bouncing across back roads selling farms. Dodie Gilmore is a spry 60-year-old who loves the outdoors, but when she could no longer straddle her faithful horse, River, she knew it was time for a new hip.

But how could she afford it? As an independent contractor for a small Coldwell Banker real estate franchise in Durant, Okla., she knew her privately purchased health plan would never pay up to $40,000 for the operation.

So she asked her boss about traveling to India, where hip resurfacing alone would cost just $7,000. He not only gave her his blessing but offered to foot the bill, minus travel and hotels — making Gilmore one of the very first Americans sent overseas for surgery by an employer.

"The doctors were wonderful," Gilmore said days after being discharged, sipping coffee at a New Delhi roadside cafe with her sister, Carol, who was along for the whole trip. "The overall care was pretty darn good."

With an estimated 45 million uninsured Americans, some 500,000 trekked overseas last year for medical treatment, according to the National Coalition on Health Care. Hospitals in Thailand, India and Singapore have long been swarmed by medical tourists looking for tummy tucks and face-lifts, but many glitzy, marble-floored facilities are now gaining reputations for big-ticket procedures including heart surgery and knee and back operations.

More and more patients like Gilmore — who had never held a passport or even tasted Indian food before her trip — are returning home and spreading the word about an alternative to America's ailing health system. Businesses, insurance companies and even a state lawmaker are now also starting to eye the potential savings of outsourcing health from the world's richest country to the developing world.

"It's just one of the many ways in which our world is flattening," said Arnold Milstein, chief physician at New York-based Mercer Health & Benefits, who's researching the feasibility of outsourcing medical care for three Fortune 500 corporations. "Many companies see it as a natural extension of the competition they've faced in other aspects of their business."

Some American hospitals already rely on places like India for X-ray readings and other diagnostics, while also importing foreign doctors and nurses. But the U.S. health-care industry has been largely immune to overseas competition — just one reason behind soaring costs.

Premiums for employer-sponsored health coverage have surged 87 percent over the past six years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, putting a huge burden on both companies and employees. Family health coverage now runs about $11,500 annually, with workers themselves forking out nearly $3,000.

But just as shipping U.S. manufacturing to China and call centers to India initially created loud opposition, some critics are already preparing to fight any possible exodus of Americans packing their bags to go under the knife overseas.

In September, Canton, N.C.-based Blue Ridge Paper Products Inc., was set to send one of its employees to India for a gallbladder operation. Carl Garrett would have been the first U.S. employee sent abroad for medical care through an employer-sponsored pilot program, which would have allowed him to share the company's savings.

Shortly before Garrett was set to leave, the United Steelworkers, America's largest union, pulled the plug.

"We don't want to expose our members to the risks associated with providing health care in the Third World," said Stan Johnson, a union spokesman. "This is perceived to be voluntary, but voluntary programs tend to lead to mandatory programs."

Blue Ridge ultimately scrapped its plan for union members, but several other U.S. businesses and insurance companies are starting to explore the option of exporting patients.

"I get the impression that they're all waiting for someone else to take the first step," said Jason Yap, director of health care service for the Tourism Board in Singapore, another major medical tourism destination. "They're all interested in doing the homework now so they can move ahead when the time comes."