Medical Tourism Is No Panacea

CNN posts an article today about how people are taking advantage of health care overseas due to the high costs of health care options in the United States. What is apparently lost on CNN, and many of those who are pushing for government health care is that the people who can afford to go overseas for their health care aren't going to stand and wait in line for health care under a government imposed health care delivery system either. They're going to go elsewhere, looking for the best and most affordable care they can find.

Sandra Giustina is a 61-year-old uninsured American. For three years she saved her money in hopes of affording heart surgery to correct her atrial fibrillation. "They [U.S. hospitals] told me it would be about $175,000, and there was just no way could I come up with that," Giustina said.

So, with a little digging online, she found several high quality hospitals vying for her business, at a fraction of the U.S. cost. Within a month, she was on a plane from her home in Las Vegas, Nevada, to New Delhi, India. Surgeons at Max Hospital fixed her heart for "under $10,000 total, including travel."

Giustina is just one of millions around the world journeying outside their native land for medical treatment, a phenomenon known as "medical tourism." Experts say the trend in global health care has just begun. Next year alone, an estimated 6 million Americans will travel abroad for surgery, according to a 2008 Deloitte study. "Medical care in countries such as India, Thailand and Singapore can cost as little as 10 percent of the cost of comparable care in the United States," the report found.

Companies such as Los Angeles-based Planet Hospital are creating a niche in the service industry as medical travel planners. One guidebook says that more than 200 have sprung up in the last few years. "We find the best possible surgeons and deliver their service to patients safely, affordably and immediately," said Rudy Rupak, president of Planet Hospital. "No one should have to choose between an operation to save their life or going bankrupt."

In particular, they single out an individual who has gone to India to receive treatment, which could cost $175,000 in the US. It cost this woman $10,000 to have the procedure done in India, including airfare. More power to her that she was able to find an alternative, but I wonder whether the hundreds of millions of desperately poor Indians living in India would be able to access and receive the same care that this medical tourist received?

I'm not so sure.

It's a story worth repeating; Cuba has a thriving medical tourist industry and it is a major funding source for the Castro regime. Yet, the average Cuban doesn't get nearly the level of care that the medical tourists do. It's a distortion of the facts and health care standards.

The left continually attempts to conflate health care costs with access to health care. You might not like the cost of the health care, but it is available to anyone who needs it here in the US - and it's provided in a timely fashion. That is unlike the health care in places like the UK, where you're going to wait for weeks or months to get dental care because of shortages of dentists or the rationing of certain medications or procedures because of the costs to the government health care fund.

CNN also notes in passing a big reason why medical tourism is big business: the countries that provide nationalized health care have long waiting lists for procedures and people have decided to go outside the system to get the treatment they want:

Many South Asians and Africans said they travel abroad because they do not have access to care in their homeland.

Some Canadians and Europeans said they chose to travel aboard, despite having national health plans, because they are tired of waiting -- sometimes years -- for treatment.

Proponents of a nationalized health care system routinely ignore the salient fact. What is also ignored is that all too often, those Europeans and Canadians choose to come to the US to receive their health care services for a fee rather than wait on the lists provided by their government-issued health care system.

You can go into any of the major New York City hospitals, whether it is Memorial Sloan Kettering or Columbia Presbyterian or NYU Cornell Medical Center, and find people seeking care from all over the world because this is where the best and brightest train and provide care to their patients.

Yet, there is one unintended consequence of reporting on these medical tourism stories - the power of the marketplace to deliver business to those who can provide affordable care. If that can work on an international market level, why not at the local level?