Saturday, June 6, 2009

Reverse Medical Tourism

I saw a post on KevinMD that caught my eye. The post was that perhaps there are not more medical tourists from the US going outside of the country for medical care because there it would be harder to sue their doctors for malpractice. This got me thinking. At our medical center we have a fairly large percentage of patients from outside of the US. Most are Canadians who come because they cant have their elective surgeries there or that it would take forever to get them. Things like knee replacements etc. So, do they come here so they can get better care, or do they come so they can sue the doctors easier than they could back home?

I posed this to the CFO of the medical center and he explained that our medical tourism business has exploded and in fact is now over 7% of all admissions and represents 60% of all births. There is of course no revenue becuase these are all illegals who have come accross the border. They also are very good at filing lawsuits! So, his opinion was that US medical tourism is alive and well. You get to come to the US, get quality healthcare for free and get to try your hand at the medical malpractice lottery!

2 comments:

SeaSpray said...

That never occurred to me... tourists and illegals suing because they could.

It's just so wrong!

I hope you don't mind I linked your 2 posts in WhiteCoats recent Malpractice comments. You always have good insights into the med/mal dilemma.

SeaSpray said...

Wow... Gingrich just gave the most AWESOME speech on C-SPAN!

I'm sorry I missed the beginning. Came in where he spoke of eliminating the death tax.

It all just made such good sense... wonderful, logical good sense.*sigh*

It was like a healing balm to my politically wearied spirit... hearing the ideas... so right sounding. (no pun intended)