Those with the vaguest notions of medical tourism do know at least one thing about it: its affordability.  For awhile in the United States media, medical tourism was the equivalent of dirty word.  Its acceptance in the US is relatively late in comparison to other countries.  For a couple of decades, it has been popular in Asian and European countries.  Patients wanting to save money because of their status as underinsured and uninsured profit greatly from medical tourism.  Everything from elective to necessary surgery is available—and at much lower prices than those with which the US public has familiarity.  For example, in India, the procedures in general tend to be about 1/10 of what typical Western facilities and doctors charge for their services.  Other countries offer greater savings than this example: Costa Rica is known for reducing the same surgeries the West at about eighty percent.   With the stress of lacking or negligible health care and with economical and affordable prices, it is not surprising that global medicine has become such a trend in the health industry.

A simple comparison of prices demonstrates how the United States will need to make changes if it wants to maintain status in the health industry.  In the US, a heart bypass can go for around a hundred grand, but in Thailand, it goes for about twelve grand.  Even if that price does not include travel and other expenses, it is still a vast improvement financially over what the US offers.  Further, the price of such a surgery also includes better personal attention.  The nurse to patient ratio is often much higher in top medical tourist nations.  The actual surgery expenses are astoundingly cheap in comparisons: Thailand has hip replacement surgery at about five or six grand, whereas in the US, patients pay twenty or thirty grand.  Perhaps the most dramatic example of the money difference is in India where heart valve replacement is ten grand, but in the US it costs two hundred thousand grand.

Modern, high tech procedures come cheaper too.  In California, a foraminotomy and a laminotomy are steep, but India offers both surgeries at about eighty thousand less.  Doctors perform the former surgery to increase the area where a nerve in the spine departs from the canal.  The latter surgery is where a doctor removes vertebral bone parts—specifically the lamina.  Both surgeries are fantastic substitutes to the spinal fusion surgery, a more complicated procedure with a longer recovery period.  Less invasive and minimal in incisions, these surgeries are among the most important a patient might need.  Though medical tourism is by no means an ideal solution for patient who requires such serious surgeries, it does offer them the opportunity to get them crucial treatments when prices in the US might make it impossible.