A destination which offers quality healthcare at affordable price like India or Mexico shouldn’t be consider as “cheap healthcare” destination.

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Obama’s comment over “cheap healthcare” has sparked debate in global medical tourism industry, rightly so as any destination which offers quality healthcare at reasonable or affordable price like India or Mexico shouldn’t be consider as “cheap healthcare” destination.

Though Obama’s intentions to protect healthcare in US are worth appreciating as healthcare should be accessible, affordable and available in home country, still America can get great benefits from Medical Tourism. 

 

Dr Prem Jagyasi, Author of Dr Prem’s Guide Book on Medical Tourism argues the statement. Is avoiding medical tourism bring any solution? American government can adopt medical tourism effectively to achieve above goal. Medical tourism can play an important role in both sectors of inbound and outbound; it has several great benefits to offer if implemented properly. Instead of going against of it Americans can save great amount which could be used in improving life of individual.  This will also put American healthcare system in pressure to bring healthcare cost down, which eventually brings positive results for Americans.

 

Dr Prem says “In fact, many healthcare facilities at medical tourism destinations offer the same or higher quality healthcare services that patients from developed countries are accustomed to. This is predominantly to the advances in accreditation and standardization”.  Patients can read more about this in Chapter 4 of Dr Prem’s Guidebook on Medical Tourism. “This high quality, yet cost-effective medical services should be considered as an additional value for money when opting for medical tourism.’ added Dr Prem who is also renowned Medical Tourism Consultant.

 

There are several reasons as to why healthcare in developing countries (such as India and Thailand) are able to offer patients a much more reasonable price tag for medical services than destinations such as the US or France. Listed below are some reasons why healthcare is able to be cheaper in certain foreign destinations:*

 

·         Lower Cost of Labor (Human Resources)

·         Lower real estate values

·         Cheaper Construction Cost

·         Lower Government Taxes

·         Cheaper medical supplies/equipments/medications

·         Lower cost of prescription drugs

·         Price discrimination

·         Lower Administrative & Documentation Expenses

·         Low malpractice cost abroad

None of above could lead to affordable healthcare to the low quality of healthcare or “cheap healthcare”.

The realm of medical services has expanded its horizon by offering global healthcare at much reasonable rates, so patients worldwide can benefit from it. The escalating growth and popularity of the medical tourism sector demonstrates the variety of advantages patients can achieve by engaging in medical travel. The most important and obvious benefit for patients are the low-cost and high quality healthcare options in medical tourism destination, as the healthcare costs in their countries are extremely high. But benefits are not limited to cost saving and high quality of care alone; there are many benefits—if we classify them we can have as many as seven individual categories for such benefits which encourage patients to step out of their geographies. Also, the idea of recuperating from a treatment and relaxing in an exotic location should be enough of a reason to get patients packing their suitcases and heading towards the airport.

Seven benefits of medical tourism for consumers

·         Affordability (cost saving)

·         Easy accessibility (immediate treatment)

·         Availability of services at other destinations

·         Better quality of healthcare services

·         Privacy

·         Personalized services aboard

·         Tourism benefits

Read more about Dr Prem Jagyasi at www.DrPrem.com

*Excerpts from Dr Prem’s Medical Tourism Guide Book http://drprem.com/medical-tourism-guidebook

Contact: www.drprem.com/contact

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