Medical tourism and domestic population health

Giuseppe Tattara

No 2010_02, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari"

Abstract: Medical tourism is a term to describe the rapidly-growing practice of traveling across international borders to obtain health care. Services typically sought by travelers include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries. Over 50 countries have identified medical tourism as a national industry. This article deals with the situation of India that is promoting the "high-tech healing" of its private healthcare sector as a tourist attraction. The government hopes to encourage a building trade in medical tourism, selling foreigners the idea of travelling to India for low-cost but world-class medical treatment and India is becoming a "global health destination". This policy however does not develops into better services for the local population as corporale hospitals are clustered in urban settings, their prices are out of reach to the locals and the quota of beds reserved free of charge to the domestic population is often disregarded.

Keywords: Medical tourism; Corporale hospitals; Life expectacy; Economic development; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-hea and nep-tur
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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