Medical tourism flourishes
In the United States, medical care costs, especially for surgical procedures requiring one or more overnight hospital stays, have skyrocketed over the past 20 years. As a result, more and more Americans are traveling across the border or across an ocean to receive their medical care.
Obviously, if you are in crisis in a hospital and you need immediate open-heart surgery, or the like, you can’t suddenly opt to fly to Thailand for the procedure. However, the majority of surgeries performed in this country are either fully elective or not extremely time-critical. When that is the case, more and more people every year are choosing to have those procedures done outside the U.S. It’s called “medical tourism.”
These figures will give you an idea of why Americans are going to the trouble and expense of traveling abroad for some…
