Travel For Your Health
Medical tourism has gotten a lot of play lately, and has a surprisingly long history in Hawaii. Before we ever knew the term, Hawaii’s hospitals were making money from patients that were coming from Japan and Taiwan for rehabilitation programs in the tropical sun. This was back in the early 1980s, when I did some work with Honolulu’s Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific. They were attracting patients from Asian societies that traditionally shunned handicapped patients and kept them hidden away from all eyes. These patients prospered in Hawaii in a program that not only provided the rehab therapies they needed, but spent half the day getting them out to beaches, parks, shopping centers and in touch with humanity. Worked miracles.
Medical tourism then started to go the other way. Famously, Hawaii’s singer Don Ho made several trips to Bangkok to receive stem-cell treatments that he could not obtain in the United States. Many other Americans ventured overseas to find either treatments they could not get at home or prices lower than those prevailing in the U.S. market. (Americans aren’t alone in this. My cardiologist in Singapore had patients from at least thirteen other Asian countries who flew in to see him. In Austria, there were regular tours across the border with Hungary that featured dental work at lower prices.)
Bangkok's Bumrungrad - Healthy Business
Asia’s ascendancy in supplying the medical tourism trade may be about to hit a bump in the road. And that bump is the new health care reform in the United States. By covering millions of Americans who were not insured or under-insured in the past, there may be less incentive for Americans to venture overseas for treatment. And, to the extent, that the reforms put a lid on prices (if they do), financial incentives for outbound medical tourism may diminish. Couple this with a more open attitude by the Obama Administration towards stem cell therapies, and Americans may have more reason than ever to stay at home. So who gets hurt by this?
Asian and Latin American hospitals and clinics that have made a specialty of attracting U.S. patients, that’s who. Muhammad Cohen interviewed officials at Bangkok’s Bumrungrad Hospital for Asia Times. Bumrungrad attracted 420,000 overseas patients last year, and they see pros and cons from America’s health reforms. Obviously, they don’t rely exclusively on the U.S. market for patients and Bumrungrad will likely kick up their marketing in other countries. Also, they see possibilities that some Americans may decide that the penalties for not buying insurance are less costly than the insurance they need, so they will continue to go overseas for treatment. And health care reform should have only a marginal impact on U.S. patients going abroad for cosmetic surgery or installation of medical devices, both of which can be substantially less expensive elsewhere. They also will continue to attract some of the six million Americans who live overseas.
