“The industry will, in the U.S., survive, grow, prosper, be a major sector of health care to the extent that it doesn’t hit any safety potholes,” he said. “The minute someone has a botched procedure somewhere and a physician back home refuses to see the patient due to liability, or the minute the media pick up on a major negative outcome as a result of fairly poor care in one of these offshore settings, then you’ve got the potential for the bubble bursting.”
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January 2011Number of Medical Tourists Coming to U.S. Fairly Flat
Most of the attention given to medical tourism has focused on U.S. patients traveling abroad for care. But how common is the reverse situation?
The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions estimates that 400,000 non-U.S. residents sought medical care in the United States in 2008, spending almost $5 billion for health services. Most of those patients are from the Middle East, South America and Canada.
Their reasons for coming to the U.S. vary. Some come to get care that they simply can’t get in their home countries, some want to avoid long wait times, and others just want to combine business or leisure travel with some kind of specialized health care, according to the Deloitte Center.
Growth of foreign patients seeking U.S. care is expected to be sluggish, largely because travel to the U.S. has been slow since 9/11, said Paul Keckley, PhD, the Deloitte Center’s executive director.
He cautioned that it is difficult to get reliable figures.
“We can kind of get a sense of whether it’s growing, or it’s flat, or it’s declining, how they’re modifying their approach,” Dr. Keckley said. “We think inbound’s fairly flat.”
Stories circulate about large numbers of Canadian patients seeking care in the U.S., particularly those seeking diagnostic procedures such as imaging, but researchers tend to think those notions are overblown.
“Canada having such a small population and obviously having state care, it’s small,” said David Vequist, PhD, founder and director of the Center for Medical Tourism Research in San Antonio. “The thing up there is access, in terms of timing. Canadians travel obviously primarily not because of cost, but because of access.”
Dr. Keckley said there is some pent-up demand in Canada for things like cancer therapies and total-joint replacements, but the number of Canadians seeking U.S. care is fairly small.