With this being an election year, and every candidate doing everything he can think of to influence voters to vote for him, there’s a lot of talk about health insurance. From whether you have it or not, the cost of it, the ability of insurance companies to deny you coverage, the subject runs the gamut of good and bad, and I’m sure it’ll get worse before it gets better. The Dems want it one way, the Repubs want it another…there are some who think it should be free for everyone, and some who think no one should get it.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
In the meantime, there are plenty of people right now who have medical needs they can’t meet. One of the solutions some look into is visiting another country to have their health care – especially their elective care – looked into. Medical tourism is rapidly becoming a booming industry!
BellaSugar.com, a website devoted to beauty-related topics, presents a short discussion of the various options people can choose and the industry groups that promote them.
What’s Your Take on Medical Tourism? (bellasugar.com)
Advocates of medical tourism point out that traveling for surgery can save people thousands of dollars, that the physicians are licensed (and often trained within the United States), and that a luxury vacay can make surgery feel a little less awful. .
The problem is, of course, that medical care isn’t the same everywhere, and even physicians trained in the U.S. don’t necessarily keep up their standards when returning to their home countries. We Americans have come to expect a certain standard of care that, while sometimes isn’t even met here, is even harder to satisfy in other countries. And when that happens, there is often little recourse.
I had a friend who traveled to Mexico to obtain a gastric banding surgery, a surgery that has many known problems. Things went well for her for several months, but she eventually developed complications for which she seriously needed help. The problem was that the Mexican doctor was nowhere to be found, and American doctors didn’t want to interfere with the other doctor’s work, for fear they’d be blamed for her problems. Amongst all this back-and-forth, my friend nearly died before she could get someone to remove the band. The last I heard, she is on the mend now, but at some pretty significant expense, not only to herself physically, but also to her pocketbook.
This video is a special report on medical tourism that gives a good overview of the good as well as the bad aspects of this issue:
Medical Tourism | ABC News | Jeff Schult
ABC News anchor Ryan Owens interviews “Beauty from Afar” author Jeff Schult in a special report on Medical Tourism.
And finally, this video is very poorly-produced and the words are sometimes hard to understand, but it’s an excellent example of a number of the things that can go wrong if you don’t choose the right practitioner. Of course, knowing which practitioner to choose is the $64,000 question.
WARNING MEDICAL TOURISM NIGHTMARE IN SAN JOSE COSTA RICA
Doctor Alberto Coto Calvo was the Dentist. He broke my tooth causing 3 root canals preformed while in his care, Screwed up my Bite so badly that I now suffer from severe TMJ, left me with 10 open margins ( crowns are popped off my teeth ) constant pa…
So, the takeaway from these videos is pretty obvious: be very careful what you do when you are trying to save a little (or even a lot) of money with your healthcare. At the very least, I’d encourage you to only use medical tourism in the most dire of circumstances, and never, ever for elective procedures. If the procedure is elective, you should consider carefully whether taking that kind of risk is worth the perceived benefit.
Traveling is nice, but you want to be able to enjoy it, not only during your travels, but also in years to come!
