Medical tourism, also known as travel or health tourism, is popularized widely by travel agencies and mass media to provide a back-up for today's rapidly growing trends of traveling to different countries to get cheaper and modern health-care facilities.
Report shows that medical tourists are traveling largely from U.S., Europe, U.K., Canada, Middle East, Japan because of their expensive health-care system or lack of health-care options locally. It's been established now that due to a sort of lengthy procedures for some of complicated illness, such as a hip replacement, patients have to wait several months in U.K. or Canada.
Whereas the same procedures may be started-off immediately just after their arrival at in countries like India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Colombia, Philippines etc. In Colombia, the cost of knee replacement comes around $5000 USD including all associated fees.
According to research found in an article by the University of Delaware publication-the cost of surgery in Argentina, Cuba, India, Bolivia, Thailand, Colombia, Philippines or South Africa can be one-tenth of what it is in the United States or Western Europe, and sometimes even less.
A heart-valve replacement that would cost $200,000 or more in the U.S., for example, goes for $10,000 in Philippines and India-and that includes round-trip airfare and a brief vacation package.Similarly, a metal-free dental bridge worth $5,500 in the U.S.costs $500 in India or Bolivia and only $200 in the Philippines, a knee replacement in Thailand with six days of physical therapy costs about one-fifth of what it would in the States, and Lasik eye surgery worth $3,700 in the U.S. is available in many other countries for only $730.
Cosmetic surgery savings are even greater. A full face-lift that would cost $20,000 in the U.S. runs about $3,000 in Cuba, $2,700 in the Philippines or $2,500 in South Africa or $2,300 in Bolivia. Medical tourism has got momentum in India as some of the U.S. firms prescribe India for health-care. News goes around just like that get a new knee or hip at a discount,take a companion along for free plus pocket some of the money saved on the operation.Thats the kind of incentive some U.S. companies are offering employees who travels to India for health-care.
Although individual foreign patients have been coming to India for quite some time now, this kind of initiatives open up the floodgates of new wave of medical tourism. Blue Ridge Paper Products,a North Carolina based company, looking for outsourcing of its 2,000 employees to save up substantially as the cost of treatment in India is 80-90% less than in the U.S.
Here's the sheer economics at work where Blue Ridge plans to pay all the travel, lodging, meals, etc. for the patient and one family member, plus give up to 25% savings and they tied up reputed hospitals such as Apollo, Wockhardt, Escorts.
