Medical Tourish: Is Traveling to a Mexican Hospital a Good Idea When It Comes to Surgery?

Over the past decade, the medical tourism industry has sprung up around the world. Due to increasing costs of healthcare and health insurance in many Western countries, citizens of these countries are beginning to travel to developing nations to receive healthcare at affordable prices. This paper airs to build an overview of the medical tourism industry, specifically focusing on Americans traveling to Mexico. High quality private hospitals with JCI (Joint Commission International) accreditation and American trained doctors have already been built in towns relatively near the United States border, with the hope of attracting American patients. To the dismay of these hospitals, they are not seeing nearly the volume of foreign patients that they anticipated. Some potential reasons for this are lack of information on price transparency and cost saving potential as compared to the same procedures in the US, fear of low quality of care, and a mistrust of Mexico due to recent and increasing publicity of cartel and gang related violence. These issues are discussed in order to help a potential patient decide if medical tourism is the right option. The continued growth of this industry will likely have a large effect on the future of American and other Western healthcare, adding an element of competition that has not been there before