Helped by active government support, a boom in cosmetic surgery and a pool of experienced surgeons, South Korea wants to surpass Singapore, Thailand and India to become Asia's new medical tourism hub. The South Korean government is stepping up efforts to win parliamentary approval of a bill that would legalize profit-oriented medical brokerages linking hospitals and patients. But even without local insurance benefits, foreigners find high-quality services cheaper than in the United States or Japan, said South Korea Health Minister Kim Soung-Yee.
More than 1 in 4 workers earning at least $60,000 a year went without insurance in 2006, and such workers are too well-off to be eligible for medical assistance. They can, however, often wring tens of thousands of dollars out of hospital "rack rates" by going abroad for treatment. Estimates on the number of those who are leaving the United States for surgery range from an ultraconservative 5,000 to 500,000 annually if minor procedures are counted. Some employers and big insurers are so intrigued by medical tourism that they're beginning to look for signs that they should start covering it.
A $3 million, five-year grant will allow the University of Alabama-Birmingham to head a major initiative to reduce health disparities among older blacks in rural areas. UAB will lead a collaboration with Morehouse School of Medicine, Tuskegee University and the University of Alabama which will focus on blacks living in rural areas of the Deep South. The nation's elderly black population is growing at a high rate, and there is a serious health gap between blacks and whites that must be addressed, officials said.
In an effort to refute arguments that expensive hospital bills are primarily to blame for high healthcare costs, the Dallas Fort Worth Hospital Council has released a study to outline hospitals' economic impact. The council's 73 member hospitals added more than 216,000 jobs in 2007 and contributed $312 million in county residential property taxes from direct and secondary employees, according to research. The council's study also found that local hospitals created more than 93,000 jobs in their facilities, 12,500 construction jobs from capital improvement projects, and 110,000 secondary jobs through contractors working to support hospitals.
A coalition of healthcare organizations have sued California to block a 10 percent cut in Medi-Cal rates. The cuts would put Medi-Cal and Denti-Cal, safety net programs for the state's poor, on the verge of a "healthcare catastrophe," said members of the coalition. Fewer doctors would be willing to accept patients on Medi-Cal because the reimbursement rate is already the nation's lowest, the officials added. The suit seeks an injunction to halt $1.3 billion Medi-Cal program cuts that were approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Approximately 6.6 million people in California receive Medi-Cal.
Although there remains potential for huge growth in the industry, the number of people traveling the globe for medical treatment likely is far lower than commonly assumed, according to a study by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Just 60,000 to 85,000 patients a year travel to another country expressly for inpatient hospital care each year, according to the study. In addition, most aren't seeking low-cost care in the developing world, but many of the medical tourists instead seek the latest treatments available in the United States and other industrialized countries.