AMERICA THE EXCEPTIONAL - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 274

“It was as good a dental experience as I've ever had in the United States, and I got to
spend a long weekend on the beach eating all the fish tacos I wanted,” she said. “Dr. Arden
said it was normal for him to have gringo patients from the United States—he called them
medical tourists.”
There are no comprehensive figures for medical tourists like my friend Dorothy.
However, she is a typical medical tourist. She is an American fleeing rising U.S. costs who
is wealthy enough to afford to travel but who cannot keep up with the rising costs of medic-
al insurance. There are 5 million patients worldwide, the majority American like Dorothy,
traveling the world looking for the best value for medical treatment and a nice vacation as
well. The top ten destinations, in alphabetical order, are Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Korea,
Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey.
What started with Americans crossing the Canadian and Mexican borders to buy inex-
pensive pharmaceutical drugs has mushroomed into a stream of Americans searching for
medical care and a vacation. On the border with Mexico, American medical tourists be-
came so numerous that a special highway lane was opened for them in April 2012. In the
first three months over 1,500 passes to the lane were issued.
Early on, Costa Rica saw medical tourism as a good fit. The country has a solid repu-
tation for medical care. The tourism sector was growing, and people traveling for health
care fit well in the overall scheme of green tourism.
In most cases these countries have programs developed by their ministers of health and
tourism to accommodate the growing number of foreigners seeking quality, inexpensive
care as well as a pleasant trip overseas. In many cases the hospitals have international ac-
creditation and some American health insurance plans cover the care and the cost of the
trip. All of this raises serious questions about putting your life in the hands of a travel agent,
questions that were answered at the MediTour Expo at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.
There were no more than two hundred in attendance: travel agents, doctors, foreign
ministry officials and entrepreneurs. Every other speaker talked about the beginning of a
sea change in medical care and then hedged that prophecy with caveats about responsib-
ility and accountability of far-off doctors and hospitals.
“There are dysfunctional medical systems that are broke—God knows, the U.S. system
has issues,” said Dr. Arlen Meyers, a physician from Colorado who opened the conference.
He talked about a global war for medical talent, of the need for a “seamless global referral
system” and the construction of a city like “Las Vegas with health care at its base.”
Then he asked a question uppermost in my mind: “Anyone can go on the Internet and
sell medical tourism overseas—how can we measure its quality?”
Dr. Mary Wong Lai Lin, from the Healthcare Travel Council of the Malaysian Ministry
of Health tried to answer those questions when she discussed the astronomical growth of
medical tourism to her country. The former British colony set up this medical tourism
council in 2009 and designated thirty-five Malaysian hospitals throughout the country as