WASHINGTON – The emergence of medical centers in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe that provide state-of-the-art procedures with a human touch and a gentle price tag has many U.S. citizens flying abroad to seek care they might have gotten at their local hospitals.
Medical travel–don't call it medical tourism anymore–has increased rapidly in recent years. In principle, there's nothing really new about it. For years, wealthy individuals from all over the world have flown to the United States or Western Europe for advanced procedures not available at home.
What is new is the ease of medical travel, the numbers of people getting treated away from home, and the direction: away from the United States and toward Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
Last year, roughly 150,000 Americans headed overseas for surgical procedures, estimated Josef Woodward, author of “Patients Without Borders: Everybody's Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism” (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Healthy Travel Media, 2007) the first, but surely not the last, popular book on the subject. His estimate is conservative; some observers put the number at closer to half a million.
Approximately 60,000 Americans have sought care at Bumrungrad International in Bangkok, widely recognized as one of Asia's leading hospitals, according to Curtis Schroeder, group CEO of Bumrungrad.
“Why travel to a hospital you can't even pronounce, in a country you've never visited, with doctors who have strange names you can't spell? There are several reasons: geopolitical factors; economic crises; lack of access to care, which is especially true for uninsured Americans or people from Western Europe who do not want to wait for services provided through their national health care systems; perceived lack of quality of care in their home countries; and family microeconomics,” said Mr. Schroeder, who previously was with Tenet Healthcare Systems, opening Tenet hospitals in several different countries.
Health care abroad is an appealing option for moderate-income Americans who are not insured. But even those with insurance are feeling the pinch and looking overseas. Mr. Schroeder cited a Time magazine survey indicating that 61% of uninsured Americans polled would travel 10,000 miles if they knew they could save $5,000 on a major medical procedure. Among those with insurance, the number was 40%.
“These are the first wave of medical tourists,” he said.
U.S. Standards … or Better
According to Ori Karev, head of UnitedHealthGroup's Ovations program to improve health in people over the age of 50 years, there are 110 hospitals around the world accredited by the Joint Commission International that provide health care that is as good if not better quality than the care at top U.S. hospitals. JCI uses the same criteria as the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and serves the same general purpose.
The International Organisation for Standardization, a 157-nation network of accrediting institutions based in Geneva, also accredits hospitals and clinics abroad, but focuses mainly on facilities management and administration, not clinical measures.
“While ISO accreditation is good to see, it is of limited value in terms of treatment,” according to Mr. Woodward's book.
JCI-accredited hospitals, many of which are run as joint government-private sector partnerships, are typically founded on the relatively solid economic bedrock of national single-payer health systems. They provide services at far lower cost than U.S. hospitals, in part because the surrounding social and cultural milieu is relatively free from many of the cost drivers in the U.S. system: insurance bureaucracy, tort law, high malpractice settlements, entitlement mentality, and deficit-spending lifestyles.
Once largely confined to elective cosmetic procedures or experimental treatments, medical travel now encompasses everything one would expect at an American or European tertiary-care center, including cardiovascular surgery, organ transplants, hip and knee replacements, and advanced cancer therapies. American- or European-trained clinicians at JCI-accredited hospitals are performing such procedures with outcomes equivalent to any U.S. center, adverse event rates comparable or even substantially lower than at U.S. hospitals, and at markedly reduced costs.
Mr. Woodward estimates Americans traveling for health care can expect to save between 15% and 85% on the cost of equivalent care in the United States. Savings vary widely with the type of procedure, the country visited, and any add-ons such as vacation time. But for most major procedures, the savings are massive. (See box.)
Brazil, Costa Rica, and South Africa currently are hot destinations for cosmetic procedures; Costa Rica, Mexico, and Hungary are magnets for good, affordable dentistry, and India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore are the best choices for major surgeries, including heart surgeries, organ transplants, and orthopedics, according to Mr. Woodward's book.