Medical Tourism

This article came to my attention today. Medical costs are through the roof and I believe will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. Small business owners find it tough to offer health insurance to employees and even large companies find that a huge portion of the bottom line is eaten up with health care costs. Enter Medical Tourism which the article is pointing out is taking off in some areas. I for one believe that this will become the way to go eventually. With the costs so high people have to look for alternatives and medical tourism will be one such option. This is a spin off of globalization. It is not new really. Recently there was the whole buying drugs from Canada and Mexico. Now you can go to a variety of places for surgery. In some cases the cost of airfare, lodging in the foreign country and medical services could be less than staying in the US and having surgery.

I first heard of Medical Tourism from a Business Week article some time last year and then heard more from Aubyn Hill the former chairman of NCB (?) in a presentation to the Jamaican USA Chamber of Commerce at a Power Lunch last year. In the presentation, he highlighted some areas for investment that the Diaspora could tap into and one such area was medical tourism. The numbers were impressive. A 2% share of the US market could result in over 1 million visitors to the island. With the large number of US uninsured population, it would make sense that medical tourism is an area worth looking into. Jamaica has a good, trained medical staff according to Hill and with the island already being a tourism destination there is no reason why this area could not be tapped into. The Caribbean as a whole should look to embrace this since there is a growing demand and the the payoff could be huge.