While Swiss hospitals are banning North Americans because they are too litigious to accept as patients, another perplexing case has come up. The Medical Tourism Association, a Florida, U.S. based non-profit organization, is threatening to sue the International Medical Tourism Association, a Singapore based non-profit organization, for unfair competition and trade name infringement.

This is strange on two points. First is that they are both non-profits, so why is there concern about “unfair competition”? Aren’t they both simply trying to help people who need solutions for low cost medical care in other countries? Or is there really some profit motive involved? The answer to that question seems obvious – the MTA must have some profit incentive in order to take action like this.

On the trade name infringement issue, IMTA was registered in October 2006 while MTA was registered in May 2007. So the U.S. based organization would be the one infringing and the IMTA should be suing them, not the other way around. But since the IMTA is managed by unpaid volunteers they don’t have much motivation to go around suing people.

This story needs a little investigative journalism thrown its way to find out what MTA is really about and who is behind this. Maybe we will have some followup here in the near future.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 4:37 am and is filed under Medical Tourism News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.