Monday’s had a front-page article of interest to AsiaHealthCareBlog readers: “”. From their Beijing bureau, the article begins by stating “Healthcare services overseas are attracting increasing numbers of Chinese customers who are willing to pay for quality and privacy.” This trend seems to roughly shadow the trend of wealthy Chinese going abroad as tourists, except this trend emphasizes healthcare needs above luxury goods and China-centric hotels available as Chinese go abroad.
Healthcare tourism is a , largely from developed countries as consumers find they can have procedures completed more cost-effectively abroad than at home. The with well-off customers who would leave their home country to travel to Europe or the United States for procedures that required more technological sophistication than what they could find at home. However, this practice spread to plastic surgery and is now growing increasingly common for elective procedures like .
Face lifts state side run between $7,000-$10,000; but, travel to Costa Rica and you can expect to pay between $2,500-$3,500. Hip surgery in India runs $7,000 and $48,000 in the United States. If you have insurance, that difference may not be something you ever see; but if you have to pay for the surgery yourself, then all of a sudden India starts to look pretty compelling.
All pretty interesting, but what is driving American and European health-tourism is different than what is driving Chinese health-tourism. According to the China Daily, “Nearly 60,000 Chinese people go abroad annually for healthcare services, especially for anti-aging therapy, cancer screening, to give birth and to get treatment for chronic diseases.” Citizens from developed economies go abroad to save money on healthcare expenditures; citizens from China go abroad to get procedures they can’t domestically.
It’s a critical difference that speaks volumes to what remains to be provided in China that domestic Chinese trust when it comes time to have their disease states managed. Count me as one that believes the better business approach and the one the central government is much more invested in empowering is expanding healthcare into main-land China versus making it easy for domestic Chinese of means to go abroad.
About the Author
[...] healthcare that the Chinese themselves trust they can access at home. The full post can be read here. Category: China, Healthcare Tag: AsiaHealthCareBlog, China, Healthcare Tourism November [...]
I attended the International Medical Tourism conference in Chicago just a couple weeks ago, to represent my company. I was very impressed at the scale of this industry, already a 6 billion USD a year industry. Your comments are interesting because you discuss “outbound” medical tourism, when most countries want “inbound” tourism. Many, many Asian groups from Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand especially are wooing medical tourists, including Chinese tourists. There really is only a very small amount of tourists coming to China for medical care, and the main reasons may be for traditional medicine, or stem cells and others.