Currently medical tourists or medical travelers from developed industrialized countries are traveling in large numbers abroad where the quality of healthcare is equal to or even better than the standards in their own country and yet the cost is significantly lower. These healthcare destination countries also offer numerous options for escapes to vacation touring trips; sight-seeing, shopping, exploring journeys and lounging on sun drenched exotic beaches for medical health care travelers.
Factors that have led to the increasing popularity of medical travel are as follows: -
Ø The high cost of health care
Ø Long wait times for certain procedures
Ø The ease and affordability of international travel
Ø Improvements in both technology and standards of care in many countries.
Medical tourists can come from anywhere in the First World, including Europe, the Middle East, Japan, theUnited States, and Canada. This is because of their large populations, comparatively high wealth, the high expense of health care or lack of health care options locally, and increasingly high expectations of their populations with respect to health care. An authority at the Harvard Business School recently stated that “medical tourism is promoted much more heavily in the United Kingdom than in the United States”.
A forecast by Deloitte Consulting published in August 2008 projected that medical tourism originating in the UScould jump by a factor of ten over the next decade. An estimated 750,000 Americans went abroad for health care in 2007, and the report estimated that a million and a half would seek health care outside the US in 2008. The growth in medical tourism has the potential to cost US health care providers billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Ø Those who want urgent surgery
A large draw to medical travel is convenience and speed. Countries that operate public health-care systems are often so taxed that it can take considerable time to get non-urgent medical care. Using Canada as an example, an estimated 782,936 Canadians spent time on medical waiting lists in 2005, waiting an average of 9.4 weeks.Canada has set waiting-time benchmarks, e. g. 26 weeks for a hip replacement and 16 weeks for cataract surgery, for non-urgent medical procedures.
Ø Those who want elective Surgery
Additionally, patients are finding that insurance either does not cover orthopedic surgery (such as knee/hip replacement) or imposes unreasonable restrictions on the choice of the facility, surgeon, or prosthetics to be used. Medical tourism for knee/hip replacements has emerged as one of the more widely accepted procedures because of the lower cost and minimal difficulties associated with the traveling to/from the surgery. Colombiaprovides a knee replacement for about $5,000 USD, including all associated fees, such as FDA-approved prosthetics and hospital stay-over expenses. However, many clinics quote prices that are not all inclusive and include only the surgeon fees associated with the procedure.
Ø Those who are uninsured
According to an article by the University of Delaware publication, UDaily:
The cost of surgery in India, Thailand or South Africa can be one-tenth of what it is in the United States orWestern Europe, and sometimes even less. A heart-valve replacement that would cost $200,000 or more in theUS, for example, goes for $10,000 in India–and that includes round-trip airfare and a brief vacation package. Similarly, a metal-free dental bridge worth $5,500 in the US costs $500 in India, a knee replacement in Thailand with six days of physical therapy costs about one-fifth of what it would in the States, and Lasik eye surgery worth $3,700 in the US is available in many other countries for only $730. Cosmetic surgery savings are even greater: A full facelift that would cost $20,000 in the US runs about $1,250 in South Africa.
Popular medical travel worldwide destinations include: Argentina, Brunei, Cuba, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Jordan, Lithuania, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, and recently, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Korea, Tunisia and New Zealand.
Popular cosmetic surgery travel destinations include: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico and Turkey. In South America, countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia lead on plastic surgery medical skills relying on their experienced plastic surgeons. In Bolivia and Colombia, plastic surgery has also become quite common. According to the “Sociedad Boliviana de Cirugia Plastica y Reconstructiva”, more than 70% of middle and upper class women in the country have had some form of plastic surgery. Colombia also provides advanced care in cardiovascular and transplant surgery.
A specialized subset of medical tourism is reproductive tourism and reproductive outsourcing, which is the practice of traveling abroad to undergo in-vitro fertilization, surrogate pregnancy and other assisted reproductive technology treatments including freezing embryos for retro-production.
