Cheaper Healthcare, because we know the world needs more boobjobs

Just trying to keep this girl off the street....

Why put up with expensive, run-of-the-mill health care at home when you can be treated just as well abroad? By Deloitte ’s reckoning, medical travel will represent $162 billion in lost spending on health care in America by 2012. There are signs that American health-care administrators are starting to feel the heat.

Two good articles about Medical tourism, "Importing Competition" and "Operating Profit" have been printed in the latest Economist magazine.

For a hilairious look at the medical tourism industry check out this Indian made video on outsourcing.

Belgium Medical Tourism is Booming

In 2006, scores of people have headed to Belgium - for everything from hip surgery to fertility treatment. It is not just NHS waiting lists that are forcing British patients across the North Sea. The high cost of private care in the UK means that treatment in Belgium can be a real bargain, even with travel costs added on.

Of all the treatments available for foreigners through Belgium's 'surgery supermarket', cosmetic and cardio thoracic surgery are two of the hottest items on the shelves and attract increasing numbers of customers from all over Europe.
Prices in these areas are the cheapest in the EU and the standard of hospitals and operations is second to none. STORY

MEDICAL TOURISM This will be fun!

Europeans travelling abroad for health care, ranging from dental work to open heart surgery, will have their treatment funded by their insurance.
They will simply have to pay their travel and accommodation costs, plus any top-up fees if charges in the foreign hospital are higher than local costs.
Because, of course, any such rights in the EU apply to everyone.
The plans say that patients should not be given drugs or treatments that their own state system does not fund, and that where there are waiting lists, domestic patients should have priority over foreign patients. Beyond that, EU residents would be free to travel for non-emergency care in any of its 27 countries.
But I would assume that it would be only people who would be eligible in the home country for care who would be eligible in another for care. And it isn’t true that all EU health care systems are in fact universal ones..... not at all.

Look at the withdrawal of French health care from early retirees for example (I think the reason is that they’re not of an age to get pensioners’ care an also have no income which is subject to the health care tax).
So the first necessity will be for each and every hospital in the EU to become expert in the eligibility standards of 27 different health care systems. Plus, of course, in the treatments and drugs available.

So an English woman treated in France for breast cancer would be denied Herceptin, as she would at home, while a Scot or French one, in the same hospital, under the same oncologist, might get it.

What a tangled web we weave.. READ TELEGRAPH