From Sunday's Daily Mail;
Record numbers of Britons are travelling abroad for medical treatment to escape the NHS - with 70,000 patients expected to fly out this year.
And by the end of the decade 200,000 "health tourists" will fly as far as Malaysa and South Africa for major surgery to avoid long waiting lists and the rising threat of superbugs, according to a new report.
The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration of often waiting months for operations are fuelling the increasing trend.
A year ago, you could read this at WebMD:
Dismayed by high surgical costs in the U.S., increasing numbers of American patients are packing their bags to have necessary surgery performed in countries such as India, Thailand, and Singapore.
"This is not what is sometimes snootily referred to as 'medical tourism,' in which people go abroad for elective plastic surgery," says Mark D. Smith, MD, MBA, president and chief executive officer of the California HealthCare Foundation in Oakland.
Today's "medical refugees," the term Smith uses in an article published in the Oct. 19 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, are going to foreign countries for lifesaving procedures such as coronary bypass surgery and heart valve replacement, and also life-enhancing procedures such as hip and knee replacementknee replacement.
"People are desperate," Smith tells WebMD. "This illustrates the growing unaffordability of the U.S. health care system, even to people who are by no means indigent."
And there was this 18 months ago in Time:
Whiplash was just the first agony that Kevin Miller, 45, suffered in a car accident last July. The second was sticker shock. The self-employed and uninsured chiropractor from Eunice, La., learned that it would cost $90,000 to get the herniated disk in his neck repaired. So, over the objections of his doctors, he turned to the Internet and made an appointment with Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, the marble-floored mecca of the medical trade that--with its liveried bellhops, fountains and restaurants--resembles a grand hotel more than a clinic. There a U.S.-trained surgeon fixed Miller's injured disk for less than $10,000. "I wouldn't hesitate to come back for another procedure," says Miller, who was recovering last week at the Westin Grande in Bangkok.
With this surgical sojourn, his first trip outside the U.S., Miller joined the swelling ranks of medical tourists. As word has spread about the high-quality care and cut-rate surgery available in such countries as India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, a growing stream of uninsured and underinsured Americans are boarding planes not for the typical face-lift or tummy tuck but for discount hip replacements and sophisticated heart surgeries. Bumrungrad alone, according to CEO Curtis Schroeder, saw its stream of American patients climb to 55,000 last year, a 30% rise. Three-quarters of them flew in from the U.S.; 83% came for noncosmetic treatments. Meanwhile, India's trade in international patients is increasing at the same rate.
And there's this from today's Ezra Klein:
America is actually driving the medical tourism industry that some Britons are taking advantage of. The growth of foreign treatment centers aren't a result of the failings of the British health care system (of which there are many). They're a result of the cost of American health care, and the huge numbers of sick individuals we price out. You'd think, paying two-and-a-half times what the Brits do for health care, that we could all access care, and wouldn't need to fly to India. But you'd be wrong. The Brits also have a bad health care system, but theirs is, on the bright side, very, very cheap. Ours isn't.
You don't have to go far to find someone - George Bush, for instance - who will spout the typical propaganda: America has "the best health care system in the world." True enough if you're a Congressperson or hoi oligoi who can afford to pay for treatment at one of the nation's top medical centers. But, compared with other nations in the developed world, the U.S. does a rotten job of delivering good care to hoi polloi. As plenty of us know firsthand, even Americans with fairly decent health coverage often find it hard to get the treatment the "best health care system in the world" should be providing. When it comes to delivery, the American health care system is a disgrace an outrage.
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