Thursday, August 16, 2007
Bargain Surgery Abroad
Neil Osterweil, Senior Associate Editor for Medpage today, takes an in-depth look at the scope o medical tourism, experimental medical procedures, organ transplants, risks involved in having surgery abroad, and his article also features extensive comments from Maggi Grace ( see interview ), whom he calls 'the enthusiast'. I prefer firebrand, but let's not quibble over words.
Also, AZCentral profiles Americans who are trying to immigrate to Mexico?? Yes, that's right!
"The Chaophya hospital is one of five hospitals in Thailand and in Singapore offering stem cell therapy for end-stage heart disease. Thailand is also a destination for medical tourists with a very different agenda from those of Dr. Supachai's patients: it is one of the world's leading centers for sex reassignment surgery. The boom in medical tourism in recent years has spawned the growth of a new travel market, with specialized agencies ready to serve their clients' clinical and travel needs, whether they're Americans seeking cosmetic surgery, or Canadians who don't want to wait up to a year for a government-funded hip replacement."
What he's basically trying to say is that other than elective surgery, medical tourism is an increasingly attractive option for any kind of medical treatment or surgery which is not immediately available or is unaffordable locally. And unless employers and health plans start considering medical tourism as an option, the slow bleed of patients going abroad, without any kind of safety net will continue.
In other news, the BBC in Budapest has been poking around into cosmetic surgery. "It's called healthcare tourism - going abroad for private treatment. Dentists in eastern Europe were the first to attract British patients for teeth whitening and other cosmetic work. But now plastic surgeons are following suit - offering bargain breast implants and other procedures."
Also, AZCentral profiles Americans who are trying to immigrate to Mexico?? Yes, that's right!Richard Slater lives at a nursing home in Mexico, comfortably settled into his own cottage surrounded by purple bougainvillea and pomegranate trees....He gets 24-hour nursing care and three meals a day, cooked in a homey kitchen and served in a sun-washed dining room. For this, Slater pays just $550 a month, less than one-tenth of the going rate back home in Las Vegas. For an additional $140 a year, he gets complete medical coverage from the Mexican government, including all his medicine and insulin for his diabetes. "This would all cost me a fortune in the United States," said Slater, a 65-year-old retired headwaiter. "I'm real happy with the place."
Um...Maybe the Mexicans should build a border fence to prevent all those seniors from the United States sneaking across the border into Mexico, trying to escape the squalor and poverty at home and enjoy the good times in Mexico....
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