Now, the US health establishment may be coming to the same realization I did. To be sure, insurers' worries about quality control and liability risk at foreign hospitals may still keep them from embracing medical tourism. But with spending on health care in America topping $2 trillion, baby boomers aging and the pool of uninsured rising above 43 million, insurers, smaller employers and individual Americans without insurance are looking at overseas care as an alternative for costly treatments, even for complex procedures like heart surgery and procedures excluded from coverage in the US. Already, more than 1,50,000 people travel abroad each year for health care.
According to Patients Without Borders: Everybody's Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism, a new book by Josef Woodman, overseas care can trim 60-80%, or more, off the price of major surgeries. Its comparison, for example, shows that a heart bypass in India costs one-thirteenth the price in America, and many foreign hospitals also offer post-operative care that includes a high degree of attention from hospital staff members.
Several insurers have proven to be medical tourism pioneers. United Group Programs, a Florida insurance company, now offers plans that reimburse types of overseas care, and works with Apollo, a leading hospital in Chennai. Health Net, another insurer, now offers subscribers in Southern California some coverage at medical facilities across the border in Mexico.
Many of these hospitals compete not only on the quality of care but also on other amenities. The Apollo hospital in Chennai has a gym and yoga studio, and Singapore has launched a series of “medi-spas,” which mix medical treatments and spa services like massage or facials. Costa Rica advertises “recovery retreats” that are like ranches created for recuperating medical tourists.
But just as American travelers begin getting comfortable with the safety of foreign hospitals, they face a new question. With developing-world hospitals focusing on medical tourists, some may take doctors away from understaffed public clinics in nations like India and Thailand, potentially leading to a public backlash against medical visitors.
Only days after my luxury dengue treatment at Bumrungrad, I saw this other side. At a larger Thai hospital where I'd walked in after feeling my fever spiking, I sat on a hard bench in the middle of a waiting room littered with cigarette butts and empty plastic bottles. For more than an hour, no one called me. When a nurse finally approached me, she warned that there would not be any doctors around for hours, and then turned and walked away.
I got up and took a cab to Bumrungrad.