The McKinsely Quarterly report “ Mapping the Market for Medical Travel stated that Medical travel was a highly relevant market worthy for further observation. That over the next couple of decades, trends may largely dispel the idea that healthcare is purely a "local service."
Medical tourists can come from anywhere in the World, including Europe, the Middle East, Japan, the United States, and Canada. This is because of their large populations, comparatively high wealth, the high expense of healthcare or lack of healthcare options locally, and increasingly high expectations of their populations with respect to healthcare. An authority at the Harvard Business School recently stated that "medical tourism is promoted much more heavily in the United Kingdom than in the United States."
Providing health insurance to the roughly 50 million people uninsured will cost approximately $120 billion a year. President Obama has proposed $60 billion or so in new revenue for this purpose but Congress seems set to reject about half of the down payment. That makes for a $90 billion healthcare hole, and no one is quite sure how to fill it, says this analysis from the New York Times.
The Deloitte report - Medical Tourism Consumers in Search of Value stated that in 2007, an estimated 750,000 Americans traveled abroad for medical care, and that this number was estimated to increase to six million by 2010.
Many factors have led to the increasing popularity of medical travel, otherwise known as Medical Tourism (MT).
These factors include the high cost of healthcare, long wait times for certain procedures, the ease and affordability of international travel, improvements in both technology and standards of care in many countries, and the debate that 46 million Americans lack health insurance.
Whatever the number of "Americans" that lack health insurance the number is staggering and continues to grow¦
(CNSNews.com) - The claim made by the White House this month that 46 million "Americans" lack health insurance is false because that number includes almost 10 million people who are not "Americans" but in fact citizens of foreign countries who happen to be present in the United States, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Medical Tourism
President Barack Obama address the American Medical Association during their annual meeting in Chicago, Monday, June 15, 2009. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
