The Dark Underbelly of Medical Tourism in the Philippines

The Debate over Affordable Healthcare

The Philippines faces tough competition as it tries to carve out its slice of the medical tourism pie.  Thailand has a well established lead in the region, India offers cheaper and more advanced surgeries, while Singaporean hospitals are among the best in Asia.  With stiff competition from rivals like these, Filipino medical tourism hotspots like Manila and Cebu have been wooing foreign patients with their own unique brand of affordable healthcare, low cost procedures like colonoscopies and cardiac surgeries, and surf and sand vacation options.  The scramble to garner more patients however has led to a disturbing trend – the growth of an industry in organ transplantation.  

Organ Sales in the Philippines

The Philippines offers low costs for a range of surgeries and medical treatments from sophisticated life saving surgeries and elective surgeries to colonoscopy and cataract surgery. But discounted rates are hardly unique in a region known for its competitive pricing in healthcare.  The sale of organs is proving to be a USP that promises to propel the country’s medical tourism ambitions.  The sale of organs for transplantation has long been banned in most parts of the world, and countries like India and Pakistan have quickly followed suit.   

Many believe the focus on the market has now shifted to Filipino cities where a large percentage of the population lives in poverty.  Some hospitals offer five star “organ transplant packages” that include all the perks of five star living with a kidney thrown in.  In fact, for all the government’s supposed helplessness over the human organ transplant racket in the country, the Philippines Information Agency, a government-owned body, openly advertises the low costs of kidney transplants in the country.  This has in turn a spawned a debate between proponents of medical tourism on the one side who see organ transplantation as something that will help drive the country’s economic growth and medical ethics scholars on the other hand.   

This latter group warns of the dangers – infections, improperly conducted transplantations – of buying organs in developing countries.  With doctors from the leading transplant hospital in the Philippines playing a major role in the country’s medical tourism road show, this trend is unlikely to reverse any time soon.