Boomers Pioneer Medical Tourism

US hospitals and insurance companies have had a monopoly over our national health status … so much so that 46 million Americans do not have health insurance.

Although segment statistics are difficult to find, a large percentage of the uninsured are also Boomers who have experienced job losses at unprecedented rates over the last few years. Many do not have health insurance because they work for small companies unable to afford health insurance for employees.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care, lack of health insurance rapidly deteriorates the health of the uninsured because of less preventive care. Physicians first discover diseases at more advanced stages. The uninsured receive less prophylactic and therapeutic care and have more aggressive mortality rates than the insured.

US hospitals charge extraordinary sums for both elective and life-saving surgeries. Concomitantly, insurance companies have forcefully increased the cost of premiums, thus crowding many out of the system and leaving them vulnerable to personal financial devastation should chronic and life-threatening diseases come to visit.

The day of reckoning is at hand. Boomers are pioneering a new form of tourism that will change the balance of power back to consumers and away from the corporate giants that have created a disgraceful healthcare crisis.

It’s called medical tourism, and it promises something most hospitals and domestic insurance companies have not quite grasped. It guarantees global medical competition.

According to TIME magazine, Wayne Steinard, 59, had heart disease. Too rich for Medicaid and too poor for health insurance, he didn’t have $60,000 for an arterial stent. PlanetHospital, a new Malibu, California, medical-tourism agency sent him to India and an accredited hospital there. It turned out that significant arterial blockage demanded an even more aggressive and costly heart bypass operation. Yet the total cost for this operation was $6,650 or about 1/15th the cost for the same procedure in a US hospital.

Four years ago, when writing the first edition of Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers, I predicted that Boomers would seek medical care solutions overseas in countries willing to charge reasonable fees for services. I did not then have a specific case study that would substantiate this prediction, but nevertheless I felt confident that Boomers will find a way around the monolithic and monopolistic U.S. healthcare juggernaut. They will not be victims for long.

Boomers, quite simply, have transformed every life stage they’ve passed through, and they will not be deterred by a broken domestic healthcare system. Their money and their numbers will create new industries once again and, this time around, they will address the vital necessity of affordable hospitalization and the insurance to pay for aggressive medical care.

US hospitals and insurance companies have been put on notice. If industry leaders don’t begin right now to fix the broken healthcare delivery system, then America’s Boomers will break these companies. Instead of paying spurious fees, due largely to inefficiency and lack of competition, Boomers will create, popularize and then refine new healthcare paradigms.

This includes cutting-edge medical vacations in far-off lands, guided and administered by entirely new medical tourism agencies. This includes affordable insurance to pay for services, perhaps offered by global insurance companies based overseas.

Furthermore, if established companies involved in US healthcare delivery don’t begin to rebuild their brands and foster a long-term relationship with the Boomer segment by offering value, this quirky generation will have no hesitation but simply to elevate and honor new brands that barely exist today.

PlanetHospital, for example.

Comments

[Taras Kuzin]

It is interesting to note that the UK with a population of 60 million people send out more medical tourists than the US with its population of 300 million. Medical tourism is at its infancy in the U.S., and countries like U.K. are far more advanced in this realm. In fact, EU recently passed a bill that allows patients in one country get medical treatments in another and get reimbursed for those procedures at home. It will take years for something like that to happen in the U.S., but it will probably happen sooner with the passing of the Health Care Reform here in the U.S.

We Americans have been "spoiled" with medical services and have been brainwashed to believe that the U.S. has the best of the best AND nobody else can come close. Well, the reality is, it is not true. Here is another little trivia. Until U.S. began requiring passports to travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, only about ten percent of American had passports. If we don't travel abroad much, how do we know what's out there?

I feel medical tourism is poised to grow in the upcoming years. The industry offers a great deal of value to Americans who are looking value and high quality medical procedures. However, prospective medical tourists should do their home work when selecting reputable, state-of-the-art clinic for their medical procedures.

[deepak]

Medical tourism in India has emerged as the fastest growing segment of tourism industry despite the global economic downturn. High cost of treatments in the developed countries, particularly the USA and UK, has been forcing patients from such regions to look for alternative and cost-effective destinations to get their treatments done. The Indian medical tourism industry is presently at a nascent stage, but has an enormous potential for future growth and development.

[Shilpa Raghav]

Indeed, medical tourism has not only hit the big headlines, but is also touching our lives today, in many ways, both small and big. I really hadn't given much thought to medical tourism as a concept until I got a firsthand view of it when my cousin landed up at my house saying she was on a 'medical vacation'.

My cousin, who is a native of Australia, got herself a face-lift at the Chennai Apollo Hospital, and she is extremely satisfied. I took her to Apollo based on a recommendation I received on a site called eMedispace, and I am grateful to the person (Vicki) who recommended the hospital. The treatment was cost-effective and the results were dramatic! My cousin looks years younger now. The best part was the minimal scarring and her quick recovery.

I would recommend Apollo to anyone else who wishes to go in for a face-lift. And I would also recommend eMedispace (http://emedispace.com) to anyone looking for the right place to go for a medical trip.

[paul]

Medical tourism is becoming the magic mantra of sorts, primarily because a lot of Americans and Brits find it not only inexpensive to get their elective treatments done abroad, but also exciting since they get to take a vacation while they are at it. The growing trend of attracting international patients around the world has virtually evened the playing field. Patients around the world have more choices when it comes to choosing surgeons and physicians to treat them and their conditions. In the medical field, borders are dissolving.

Today, people travel to distant locales like Singapore, Thailand and India for cosmetic, heart and orthopedic surgeries. They choose Brazil, Argentina, Mexico or South Africa for dental or cosmetic treatments. Many countries in the Far East are also beginning to tap the potential of this business proposition and are jumping onto the medical tourism bandwagon.

To cut a long story short, medical tourism is the in thing today. And it’s a win-win situation for the patients as well as for two industries in the host countries, namely, the health industry and the tourism industry.