Medical tourism to Latin American
is on the cusp of booming

I have long been convinced that medical tourism will be one of Latin America's biggest industries in the 21st century. On a visit to Panama City recently, I got a glimpse of the coming boom. It's not just that 100 million Americans will reach retirement age over the next 30 years, and growing numbers of them won't be able to afford ever-rising U.S. health-care costs. Americans already are traveling to Panama, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina and Chile, among other countries, for heart operations, cosmetic surgery or dental work at half price, and with more personalized attention. Before I tell you what I saw here, let me share with you some figures from a new book by Milica and Karla Bookman. It quotes United Nations figures as saying that the $4.4 trillion-a-year travel and tourism industry has in recent years become the world's largest industry, bigger than the defense, manufacturing, oil and agriculture sectors. And in many countries, medical tourism is becoming an increasingly growing slice of the travel and tourism sector. (more)

"Several decades ago, when exotic-locale tourism first took off, the attraction was the three S's: sun, sand and sex," the authors write. "The three S's of developing countries have now been replaced by four S's: sun, sea, sand and surgery."

Thailand receives 400,000 medical tourists a year and Costa Rica about 150,000, it says. And one of the reasons Spain's economy is growing twice as fast as that of most of its neighbors is that hundreds of thousands of German, Swedish and British retirees are living several months a year in Spain, enjoying the warm weather, good life and cheaper health care.

Recently, I visited Panama City's brand-new Punta Pacifica Hospital, affiliated with the United States' Johns Hopkins hospitals. Foreigners — mostly Americans without medical insurance or seeking services not covered by their insurance and Canadians who don't want to wait eight months for an operation in their country's socialized health system — already make up about 25 percent of the new hospital's patients.

Rolando Bissot, the hospital's medical director, told me that a simple coronary bypass surgery that costs $60,000 in the United States costs $30,000 at his hospital in Panama. And a breast implant that goes for $12,000 in the United States is performed for $6,000 here, he said. In Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, these procedures are even less expensive.

But will Americans trust Panamanian doctors? I asked. They already do, he said.

Bissot noted that many U.S. doctors are foreign-born. Indeed, the New England Journal of Medicine says that 25 percent of U.S . doctors studied abroad, and 60 percent of these doctors studied in developing countries.

The 65-bed Punta Pacifica Hospital is not only routinely supervised by Johns Hopkins inspectors, but three of its doctors are U.S.-certified surgeons who perform the same procedures in Miami and New York hospitals, Bissot said.

One of them, orthopedic surgeon Jose Jaen of Miami, told me in a telephone interview that he often tells his U.S . patients who can't afford an operation in the United States to have it done in Panama.

"It's the same surgeon, the same operation and the same orthopedic treatment that the patient would get in my Miami clinic, but at half the price," Jaen told me. "And that includes airfare and hotel."

My opinion: The big challenge for Latin America will be to get its hospitals accredited by the Joint Commission International, the international branch of the U.S. agency that accredits U.S. hospitals.

So far, while China, India and several other developing countries have JCI-accredited hospitals, in the Americas outside the United States and Canada only hospitals in Brazil and Bermuda have reached that level, according to the JCI Web page. (Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama, among others, are applying for accreditation.)

But we're witnessing the beginning of a booming industry that will expand to retirement communities, health-focused hotels and spas for all kinds of treatments. Much like Spain, Latin American countries may dramatically improve their standards of living by becoming hosts to rich countries' retirees.

And if the competition helps put downward pressure on U.S. health-care costs, there will be even more reasons to celebrate.