Health on the go

More people are engaging in medical tourism because of rising health care prices in the United States, said Greg Scandlen, director of Consumers for Health Care Choices at The Heartland Institute. “As more and more people have out-of-pocket responsibility, they’re looking around for the best deal, and out-of-country services are an incredibly good deal if you’re willing to travel,” Scandlen said.

The rise in medical tourism is cause for alarm among some domestic health care providers, and it will end up forcing them to improve their services. “I’d compare this to the introduction of Volkswagens and Toyotas, what that did to American automotive manufacturers,” Scandlen said. “It’s showing another way of doing business that the automakers in the United States were just too indifferent to adopt, so competition had to come from somewhere. It came from overseas.”

By hook or by crook, the U.S. health care industry is going to have to re-think how it is they do business in our global village because the competition is no longer strictly within our borders.

Read more, here.

H/T: Carpe Diem