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Healthcare tourism is a term that has risen from the rapid growth of international healthcare where people from all around the world are traveling to other countries to obtain general medical surgery, cosmetic plastic surgery and dental surgery at a fraction of the cost of healthcare in the USA, Canada or UK. At the same time as receiving surgery abroad, patients can experience the excitement and adventure of the cultural attractions their destination country offers.
There are many reasons for the increased popularity of medical travel services:
- Exorbitant healthcare costs in industrialized nations
- Long waiting lists for surgery in countries offering socialized healthcare
- Ease and affordability of international travel
- Favorable currency exchange rates in foreign countries resulting in low cost surgery
- Rapidly improving technology and standards of care in many countries
- Proven safety of healthcare in select foreign nations
- International accreditation of foreign hospitals
- U.S., U.K. and Australian board certified surgeons operating in select foreign countries
More and more people are traveling abroad as an affordable, enjoyable, and safe alternative to having medical, dental, and cosmetic surgical procedures done in their home countries.
Currently medical tourism patients are traveling in large numbers to India where the quality of affordable healthcare is equal to anywhere else in the world and yet the cost is significantly lower. India also offers numerous options for touring, sight-seeing, shopping, exploring, and relaxing.
It has been mentioned that overseas healthcare, sometimes referred to as medical tourism, medical travel or health tourism, is expected to become a multi-billion dollar industry by 2012. Whether you call it medical tourism, medical travel or health tourism, the concept is the same. It appears as though this concept of traveling abroad to receive health care is going to become a viable option for many years to come.
Many options exist for the medical tourism patient - from purely elective procedures such as face lift, rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, liposuction, tummy tuck, breast augmentation, orthodontics and LASIK, to more serious procedures such as knee replacement, hip replacement, gastric bypass surgery and cardiac bypass surgery. Medical tourists can now obtain essentially any type of medical or surgical procedure abroad in a safe and effective manner for a fraction of the cost that they would face in America or England. The cost savings are enormous!
Although "medical tourism" has been the descriptor for this new emerging industry, it is important to comprehend the seriousness of receiving high quality medical care and then allowing your body to recuperate from the surgery. The vacation part of the process should be viewed as the least important factor. |
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Medical tourism is going to only deal with large specialist hospitals run by corporate entities. It is a myth that the revenues earned by these corporates will partly revert back to finance the public sector. There is ample evidence to show that these hospitals have not honoured the conditionalities for receiving government subsidies - in terms of treatment of a certain proportion of in patients and out patients free of cost. If anything, increased demand on private hospitals due to medical tourism may result in their expansion. If they expand then they will need more professionals, which means that they will try to woo doctors from the public sector. Even today the top specialists in corporate hospitals are senior doctors drawn the public sector. Medical tourism is likely to further devalue and divert personnel from the public sector rather than strengthen them. 
Urban concentration of health care providers is a well-known fact - 59 per cent of India's practitioners (73 per cent allopathic) are located in cities, and especially metropolitan ones. Medical tourism promotes an "internal brain drain" with more health professionals being drawn to large urban centres, and within them, to large corporate run specialty institutions.
Medical tourism is going to result in a number of demands and changes in the areas of financing and regulations. There will be a greater push for encouraging private insurance tied to systems of accreditation of private hospitals. There is a huge concern in the developed countries about the quality of care and clinical expertise in developing countries and this will push for both insurance and regulatory regimes. The potential for earning revenues through medical tourism will become an important argument for private hospitals demanding more subsidies from the government in the long run. In countries like India, the corporate private sector has already received considerable subsidies in the form of land, reduced import duties for medical equipment etc. Medical tourism will only further legitimise their demands and put pressure on the government to subsidise them even more. This is worrying because the scarce resources available for health will go into subsidising the corporate sector. It thus has serious consequences for equity and cost of services and raises a very fundamental question: why should developing countries be subsidising the health care of developed countries? |
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