Canadians go to the U.S. for medical care in specific cases – when they need organ transplants, for example – if they cannot get what they need at home and if they can afford it.
Medical tourism is an established practice in the U.S. If healthcare costs keep rising, and especially if Obamacare is overturned by the Supreme Court, even more Americans will go abroad for treatment.
Millions of people in the industrial world have become medical tourists. The Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok treats four hundred thousand foreign patients annually. Malaysia had almost six hundred thousand last year, and South Korea a hundred thousand, a third of them Americans.
Unfortunately, figures for Canadian medical tourists, and for foreign patients in Canadian hospitals, are not readily available.
Of course, an important element in the globalization of health care is the increasingly free movement of qualified doctors and nurses.
The New Yorker article on this subject (April 16) has the caption “Club Med.”
While media are now shining a spotlight, medical tourism is not new. The history of it also badly misinterpreted. Medical tourism has always been a key driver for the movement of people through the ages, including to countries such as India. Many followed Doctors and treatments in exile banished by Churches or governments closer to home. The availability of accupuncture in the past two generations in North America is an illustration of how these trends shift over time.
So what’s new? Shorter rehab? Yes! More aggressive advertising? Yes! But what the media coverage of this always miss is that when our ancestors travelled seeking out medical tourism, most could only afford a one-way ticket. So they called it something else.
For the great majority of the people I know the reason is cost, like people going for treatment to Tijuana. Also desperation, like the availability of Laetrile as an alternative cancer treatment.