Medical Tourism: The View from Ten Thousand Feet (Policy and Politics)

Medical tourism--the travel of patients from their home country to another for the primary purpose of seeking medical treatment--is already big business. In 2005, Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, saw 400,000 foreign patients, 55,000 of whom were Americans, and centers in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, and elsewhere also attract significant foreign patient populations. (1) Some of these patients are seeking care that is unavailable at home, such as surrogacy services or stem cell treatments. Others are uninsured or underinsured Americans looking for price savings (in some cases upwards of 80 percent) compared to what they would pay out of pocket in the United States. (2) Governments, too, have taken interest. The U.S. Senate held a hearing, "The Globalization of Health Care: Can Medical Tourism Reduce Health Care Costs?" West Virginia considered (but ultimately rejected) a bill that would have given its public employees financial incentives to get treatment abroad (something many self-insured U.S. firms already do). Texas has taken steps to ban insurers from making their covered populations use health care services abroad. (3)