Bloomberg has a good article about how many southern Californians covered by Health Net are being encouraged to have medical procedures at some of the big hospitals just across the border in Mexico. Many patients are being offered the option of no out of pocket expense if they get their surgeries done at one of […]

Another survey has been released, this one by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, a Wisconsin based research group. Their results show that 11 percent of employers now cover medical tourism involving medical treatment outside the U.S. The survey group was 400 U.S. corporate benefit managers.
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A story that has inflamed a lot of people tells of a new credit scoring system under development specifically to rate patients’ ability to pay their hospital bills. The name of the company developing the system is Healthcare Analytics, a Massachusetts start-up that refers to the system as a hospital risk assessment tool. Investors in […]

In recent years Thailand has expanded dramatically as a medical tourism destination for patients from the middle east. Over 60,000 patients a year come to Thailand from the United Arab Emirates alone. The outgrowth has been an increasing demand in the UAE as visitors return home with a new found interest in Thai food, hospitality […]

The China Post reports that hotel occupancy rates in Thailand are approaching 99% leading up to Christmas peak season. 450,000 tourist from Taiwan head to Thailand each year. And some of that is for the purpose of medical tourism. Taiwan’s Thai travel authority, TATTPE, strictly controls tour operators and has authorized only 23 to sell […]

This new book titled “Patients Beyond Borders: Everybody’s Guide to Affordable, World-class Medical Tourism” is yet another sign of medical tourism becoming mainstream. The publisher describes it this way:
Patients Beyond Borders is the first comprehensive, easy-to-understand guide to medical tourism, aimed at the 84 million uninsured and under-insured Americans seeking treatment options abroad for […]

The medical community in the Philippines has its eye on making the country another Asian medical tourism destination. There are plenty of good doctors and a plethora of trained nurses in the country. But they are continually leaving for greener pastures in the west. If successful in developing the Philippines as a destination for foreigners […]

An interesting bit of history of the medical tourism industry by Alfred Anderson
The present phenomenon called “Medical Tourism” was conceptualized more than a thousand years back when the Greek pilgrims traveled to the sanctuary of healing god Asklepios at Epidauria to seek medical treatments. Over a period of time Epidauria became a destination for medical […]

The InsureBlog has an interesting comment about two factors driving UK residents to flee their National Healthcare System in favor of treatment abroad.
“But for our cousins across The Pond, it’s quite obviously not about price (after all, it’s “free”), but the very real lack of care, both in quantity (waiting lists) and quality (lack of […]

Kasikorn Research Centre regularly publishes studies of different industries within Thailand and makes recommendations for business development in those segments. They recently released a study on private hospitals in Thailand. The numbers are interesting.
Thailand has 344 hospitals with 35,086 beds. There are 102 private hospitals with 15,000 beds in Bangkok. That’s 43% of the entire […]