Why Surgery Abroad?

Medical Tourism is growing fast. For those of you not intimately familiar with the concept of medical travel, the first question to be answered when it comes to having surgery done abroad is ‘Why’? Why not just go to my regional hospital? Why fly all the way to a foreign location to have the same procedure done? The answer to this very basic question has a lot of different components:

1. The biggest reason for going abroad is the cost savings. These can be substantial, up to 90%, taking the costs of airfare and lodging into account! While a heart bypass surgery in the US often times costs more than $80,000, you can get that same procedure outside of the US for $6500. If you have no insurance or do not have adequate coverage those savings are obviously important to you. If you are looking for cosmetic surgery your insurance company will definitely not be able to help you and tremendous cost savings can be obtained for those procedures as well.

2. Access to high quality. The second biggest reason is getting access to high quality doctors with significant experience in the procedure that you need. For example, only late last year did Hip Resurfacing get approved in the US. Even now that it is available domestically, you would be hard pressed to find a doctor in the US with a lot of experience performing this surgery while outside of the US this procedure has been performed for many years and surgeons that have performed more than 2500 surgeries are available. Other examples exist where the procedure has not yet been approved in the US.

3. Finally, waiting times. This specifically applies to people from Canada where the waiting times are often multiple years. When going abroad, the surgery can usually be scheduled within two weeks. This is a significant advantage when you are in pain or are looking to significantly improve your quality of life by for example having weight loss surgery done.

With almost 50 million Americans that don’t have health insurance and a broken social health care system in Canada it is easy to see that you are not alone in pursuing this. In 2006 more than 150,000 Americans went outside of the country to obtain medical care.