Medical Tourism Causes Complications

By Christina L. Madden
Carnegie Council
Policy Innovations
October 27, 2008

Approximately 750,000 Americans traveled overseas for medical treatment in 2007, and the number of so-called medical tourists could increase to more than 15 million in 2017.

Overall the effects of medical tourism are mixed. On the one hand, the industry can boost a developing country’s gross domestic product and investment in health facilities. Upgrades in a country’s hospitals also tend to decrease external brain drain, as top physicians find local jobs instead of leaving for employment in developed nations.

In many cases, however, medical tourism threatens to exacerbate unequal access to quality health care in developing countries. Although relatively cheap by most Western standards, the private hospitals that treat foreigners are out of reach for the majority of people, and the revenue they bring in rarely makes its way to the public sector.

External brain drain is often replaced by internal brain drain, as doctors leave public health care centers to work in private hospitals.

Medical tourism is not an alternative to significant reform of the U.S. health care industry. Aside from the negative effects on public health overseas… medical tourism is not predicted to reduce the country’s health spending by more than 1 to 2 percent.

By introducing global competition to an industry that’s long been considered immune to outsourcing, medical tourism may up the ante on reforming coverage, cost, and quality at home.

http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/briefings/data/000083

Previous studies have shown that one of the reasons that health care is so expensive in the United States is that, quite simply, our prices are very high. Since other nations have been demonstrated to be capable of selectively providing high quality care at much lower prices, it is not surprising that medical tourism has become an attractive option for those paying the bills, including cash-paying patients, some insurers and some employers.

For those who believe that health care financing should be a function of markets, medical tourism would have a prominent place in the menu of options. For those who believe that health care systems should provide everyone with the best options available in an egalitarian system, both for us in the United States and for the people of other nations, medical tourism is a troublesome development.

As this article describes, medical tourism is further impairing public health programs in developing nations. In our quest for a high performance system in the United States, we must be very careful to avoid the unintended consequence of inflicting damage on the health systems of other nations.