Health Care Reform Predicted to Drive Medical Travel Growth
by Nicholas Verrastro |
With the enactment of health care reform, “the fundamentals for U.S. outbound medical travel — cost savings and access to quality care — remain in place,” stated Josef Woodman, author of Patients Beyond Borders, in the publication’s summer newsletter.
“As Americans continue to age into financially challenging medical conditions, we expect to see steady future growth for the medical tourism sector,” he said.
He noted that as health care reform will be slowly implemented over the next several years, “we will undoubtedly see increased burdens on our already groaning healthcare infrastructure. In accommodating 30-plus million new healthcare consumers, all but the wealthiest Americans will likely experience an increased and acute shortage of primary care physicians, nurses, and administrative staff, resulting in longer waits for treatment.” That will increase the ranks of the underserved because limited resources will be triaged by insurers and providers.
Woodman said that under healthcare reform the U.S. system will probably resemble ”the public-private systems found in the UK, and those emerging in Canada and Germany.”
He added: “Not unlike the U.S. education system, we’ll see lower cost — although less accessible — public care for those who cannot otherwise afford more expensive private care, financed by luxury insurance plans, concierge services or out-of-pocket payments.”
Woodman said he believes that while healthcare reform for most Americans will result in “compacted access to the relative luxury of quality care their mothers and fathers enjoyed,” they will also benefit from more “transparencies in quality assurance, cost-effective new technologies, cost-comparison and patient satisfaction data” that will provide consumers with “informed choices for medical care, often international in scope.”
Anne Marie Moebes, executive vice president of Well-Being Travel, said she strongly agrees with Woodman that the economics, accessibility and availability of quality care are likely to be important factors driving the growth of medical tourism.
Moebes noted that the travel industry needs to be prepared for this growth. “This is exactly why Well-Being Travel was launched. Well-Being Travel has taken the lead on the travel side of this business to bring together the distribution system of travel agents and travel suppliers to ensure the travel side of this growing business is handled professionally and seamlessly. We partnered with Companion Global, a company that will perform the medical and health related aspect of the patient/traveler.” For more information, call (516) 624-0500 x6000.
