Medical Tourism

Medical tourism is the practice of a patient "outsourcing" healthcare services to an area outside of his/her home country. Medical travel is becoming more popular, as more people realize its benefits. The main benefits of health tourism include getting the opportunity to travel to an exotic destination and reaping potentially big monetary savings. Many common operations overseas cost a fraction of what they might cost in the United States. For instance, the average cost of rhinoplasty (or nose job) in the U.S. is $6,000; the same procedure in Costa Rica costs less than a third of that. The savings is more than enough to cover your travel expenses, and you'll get to travel to a new destination. In Costa Rica, a knee replacement surgery may cost as low as $10,500 USD compared to nearly $50,000 USD in the United States.

Medical tourism (also called medical travel, health tourism or global healthcare) is a term initially coined by travel agencies and the mass media to describe the rapidly-growing practice of traveling across international borders to obtain health care.

Such services typically include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries such as joint replacement (knee/hip), cardiac surgery, dental surgery, and cosmetic surgeries. However, virtually every type of health care, including psychiatry, alternative treatments, convalescent care and even burial services are available. As a practical matter, providers and customers commonly use informal channels of communication-connection-contract, and in such cases this tends to mean less regulatory or legal oversight to assure quality and less formal recourse to reimbursement or redress, if needed. A specialized subset of medical tourism is reproductive tourism and reproductive outsourcing, which is the practice of traveling abroad to undergo in-vitro fertilization, surrogate pregnancy and other assisted reproductive technology treatments including freezing embryos for retro-production.

Over 50 countries have identified medical tourism as a national industry. However, accreditation and other measures of quality vary widely across the globe, and there are risks and ethical issues that make this method of accessing medical care controversial.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism