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Obamacare gets a free market alternative in medical tourism

Obamacare

Last October, medical tourism conference was held in Miami where participants from 90 countries got together to share trade ideas and to boost medical tourist influx in their own countries. A report suggested that representatives from Turkey had paid $100,000 for prominent branding at the event since medical tourism accounts for $3.5 billion per year in revenue for the country that hosts 500,000 foreign patients each year.

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A burgeoning industry indeed, the sheer volume of business done in the medical tourism industry is now all set to get a massive push as Obamacare goes into effect throughout the United States.

Thanks to attractive all-inclusive packages, readily available medical visas, a choice of lodging arrangements transportation, destination and facility selection, Patients Beyond Borders and other medical tourism companies are making the $100 billion- a year global industry burgeon even more.

And the numbers truly are staggering. In 2012 alone, medial tourism brought $196 million in extra revenue to Costa Rica that also has a thriving tourism industry benefitting from American visitors. Projections for 2013 suggest that world-class medical tourism destinations in India will bring $2.3 billion in revenue to the country while its tiny Asian neighbor Singapore will gain around $4.3 billion in medical tourism-generated revenue alone.

Even by conservative estimates, an average American patient can expect to pay around 70-90% less for procedures that cost thousands of dollars in the U.S. the sheer difference in medical costs in the U.S. and a medical tourism hotspot like Costa Rica can be understood by simply comparing the cost of care the patient has to incur.

At the moment, a knee replacement costs $50,000 in the U.S. while the same procedure costs around $7,000 in India; a liver transplants costs $250,000-plus in the U.S. but in India, the same surgery costs just $40,000 at an accredited, world class hospital.

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In fact, as Obamacare is fully implemented throughout the country, American employers too are beginning to encourage employees to take up medical tourism to reduce the cost of coverage they would need to provide their workers.

As the U.S. healthcare system heads towards increased socialization, as many as 11 million Americans will travel out of the country to seek medical attention elsewhere. In the coming decade, the number of Americans seeking medical care abroad is forecasted to increase tenfold if not more should the struggling economy leave citizens with fewer options for availing healthcare locally.

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