What the Cynics Want You to Believe about Medical Tourism

Spinning Medical Tourism Tales

As the medical tourism industry surpasses expectations and grows faster than proponents or opponents can track, the debate over its virtues grows louder.  The recent kidney racket in India has had opponents of medical tourism pouncing on the chance to point out the legal, health, and moral implications of the scandal.   

One critic is Leigh Turner, a medical ethicist at McGill University who says that the practice of traveling abroad for low cost healthcare will replace one set of problems (read the state of the American health system) and replace it with a whole new set of problems.  According to him, medical tourism commercializes healthcare and creates in the patient a “sense of entitlement.” 

The doctor-patient relationship, he argues, is a delicate one and can be put under strain when the patient knows he can shop around elsewhere.   

Medical Tourism Critics

What exactly is he worried about, you wonder?  That patients will finally have access to the treatment they want?  That they will be in a position to “shop around” not only for better prices for elective surgeries and life-saving procedures, but for better quality?  That they will be empowered enough to take charge of their own health instead of waiting for a system that fails more often than it delivers, at least to those who aren’t insured?  

Why wouldn’t patients want to make decisions about the sort of treatment they receive?  If a person was looking for elective surgery like chin surgery, wouldn’t he want to have the procedure at an affordable price, in a high tech hospital, when and where he wanted it, regardless of what his insurance company had to say about it? 

Another argument that is oft repeated is that patients will have no legal recourse if anything should go wrong.  Opponents don’t seem to get that one of the reasons Americans need malpractice laws is because of the number of deaths that occur in their hospitals due to physician errors.  The number of people who die in hospitals because of medical errors is around 98,000 a year by conservative estimates, although others peg the numbers much higher.  

And these are only the deaths that occur due to medical errors.  Although these are high in number, they are hardly the only scandal in the US health care systems.  Doctors take part in obviously false television ads to promote medications and are involved in “clinical trials” of medical devices, while conveniently ignoring the fact that they are shareholders of the company that’s actually making the device.   

So, when an American medical “expert” berates a patient for going abroad to get high quality low-cost chin surgery, using moral and medical standards as an argument, it is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.

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