Medical Tourism Blog

Nicolas Sarkozy named Bernard Kouchner to be his new Foreign Minister on the 18th of May 2007. It was a fitting assignment for the 67 year old Kouchner, a former Health minister for France, whose life has been devoted to health in foreign countries. Bernard Kouchner is the co-founder of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). His aim? A worldwide effort to ensure the care of all people in need. Kouchner calls his concept patients without borders and says, "No one deserves to die of a curable disease because he is poor." I doubt if this is what he had in mind, but it exactly defines medical tourism, where a patient might go to Costa Rica for dental surgery, India for heart surgery, Thailand for Lasik surgery and Argentina for a facelift.

Another thing is the $1,500 to $2,000 a day hospitals charge for semi-private rooms..... Now let's compare this to what you would get on a cruise ship. For $200 or $300 a day you would get a fabulous room with a balcony, TV, telephone, three gourmet meals with waiters falling over themselves to serve you, nightly entertainment, pools and exercise rooms. Even airfare is included.

My suggestion: Take advantage of the cost of the services that a cruise line is able to provide and outfit a ship as an outpatient facility that is equipped to perform elective surgery.....

Your recuperation would be much more pleasant. If you were recuperating from a cataract operation, for example, instead of being incapacitated in your home for a couple of days, you would be taken care of by available attendants. Meanwhile, you could enjoy the company of other people within the relaxed atmosphere of a cruise ship. All operations would be scheduled while in port, and if the port happens to be in Mexico or Canada your prescription drugs would cost considerably less. There would be no problem getting help because cruise ships go all over the world to get capable people at the best prices. It would be no different than companies going overseas to get low-cost manufacturing.

If you ever come up with a brilliant and original idea, never, ever, google it. Breaks your heart to find that your idea was not as original as it seemed. And for the record, the guy who wrote the article I quoted above is no dreamer. He's Stephen Sharf, a former Executive VP at Daimler-Chrysler in Detroit. Necessity breeds innovation, and Motown badly needs a solution to their medical bills. Stephen Sharf was probably ahead of his time when he wrote that article. But that time has now arrived.