Medical Tourism

In Catastrophic Care, medical tourism — Americans “traveling, often great distances, to obtain procedures of similar quality at much lower prices” — is one of David Goldhill’s “green shoots”: market experiments that hint at what US health care could look like if consumers, not insurers and Medicare (“Surrogates”), were the disciplining force. The book reports an estimated one million Americans a year traveling abroad (to India, Singapore, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa) for procedures as major as heart-valve replacements, transplants, and orthopedic surgery, at prices as low as 5 percent of US prices.

Goldhill argues this is possible precisely because so many major procedures are now relatively routine — short procedure and recovery times, limited resource use, predictable results — and that increasing consumer responsibility for cost is what opened the field at all. It sits alongside his other green shoots (concierge primary care, price-transparency startups) as evidence that the missing ingredient is Competition and consumer price-discipline, not Innovation capacity; the best thing government could give these experiments, he says, is “room to experiment.”

Context: Medical tourism is the real-world practice of traveling across borders to obtain medical care, typically driven by lower cost, shorter wait times, or access to procedures unavailable at home; common destination countries include India, Thailand, Singapore, and Mexico.

Where this appears

• Catastrophic Care — cited as a “green shoot” of consumer-disciplined health care; ~1M Americans/year traveling abroad for routine major procedures at as low as 5% of US prices.