If you’ve been following all the healthcare debate in U.S., started by President Obama reform of the healthcare system, or if you watched Michael Moore’s film “Sicko”, you are familiar with the notion that millions of Americans have limited access, or none at all, to healthcare services.
On Moore’s movie, he goes to Canada and Cuba in search for affordable healthcare and he’s surprised by the quality and professionalism of medical services in both countries, 鼻埋線價錢 without the high cost of procedures, common to the American public. What he did has a name, and actually is a burgeoning industry called Medical Tourism.
Medical Tourism, according with Wikipedia, is “a term coined… to describe the rapidly-growing practice of travelling across international borders to obtain healthcare.” The Medical Tourism market is currently valued at $20 billion annually and expected to double by 2010. That’s a huge market, and neighboring countries are competing to get a share of it.
Medical Tourism is by no way restricted to U.S. citizens, as it’s a practice widely popular around the world. Nevertheless, there’s no market with the possibilities of the American, and that’s why the competence is fierce to attract the more than 200,000 Americans that traveled abroad for healthcare just in 2008, a number also expected to double by 2010.
The primary destinations for U.S. patients include India, Thailand, Mexico, Costa Rica and Singapore, and the most common procedures include dental work, heart surgery, orthopedics, cosmetic surgery, neurosurgery, fertility treatments, LASIK eye repairs, and cancer treatments.
The most common factor to travel for medical treatment is that the patient is either uninsured or underinsured, and there are 85 million Americans that fall into this category. And the savings of getting treatment abroad are in the range of 25% to 75%, which just make it a logical decision to visit some other country to get the medical services, they cannot afford back home.