Half a Million Americans Traveled Overseas to Save Money on Healthcare in 2006
In 2006, an estimated half-million Americans traveled overseas for medical treatment to take advantage of dramatically lower costs and a growing number of modern, well-staffed and well equipped hospitals that cater to the needs of foreign patients.
Supporting the trend are specialized travel agencies springing up with connections to hospitals and clinics in Europe or Mexico, as well as more exotic locations all over the world such as India, Thailand and Costa Rica.
Among the well-to-do, a tummy tuck or face lift at a foreign hospital is often combined with sight-seeing in Bangkok or Bangalore, hence the nickname medical tourism” for this growing phenomenon. But working-class people seeking affordable surgery or major dental work are flocking to foreign hospitals.
The overseas healthcare phenomenon has resulted from the soaring costs of medical care in the United States coupled with the increasing number of Americans who are either under-insured,carry very high deductibles, or who lack any medical insurance at all. The cost of traveling to a hospital in a foreign city, plus the surgery, plus hotels and for family members, usually adds up to a small fraction of the cost of just the surgery itself in the USA.
About 100 foreign hospitals are accredited by the international arm of the group that accredits U.S. hospitals. Six countries have accredited hospitals, including Bangkok’s famed Bumrungrad International Hospital, five in India and eleven in Singapore. At Bumrungrad, 125 doctors are board-certified by U.S. specialty groups. Bumrungrad has fountains, white marble floors and a Starbucks in the lobby. In 2005, it treated 58,000 Americans, a 25 percent increase
over the year before.
Hospitals in India treated 150,000 foreign patients in 2005, according to IndUShealth, a Raleigh, N.C., company that arranges overseas surgery. Costs for medical care are routinely 70 to 80 percent less in India compared with the United States.
“It’s just one of the many ways in which our world is flattening,” said Arnold Milstein, chief physician at N.Y.-based Mercer Health & Benefits in a New England Journal of Medicine story. “These patients are not ‘medical tourists’ seeking low-cost aesthetic enhancement, they are middle-income Americans evading impoverishment by expensive, medically necessary operations.”
Some insurance companies already cover foreign healthcare. Blue Shield of California and Health Net of California offer low-cost policies covering care in Mexico. Florida-based United Group Programs offers a plan covering a major hospital in Thailand that will save employers more than 50 percent on major medical costs and slash employees’ out-of-pocket expenses to zero. Many businesses are apparently sitting up and listening.