Dive Brief:
- Joining millions of Americans who have already gone overseas to seek cheaper care, large insurers are also looking abroad to find bargains on services and procedures.
- Of late, big health plans like UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint and Humana have begun encouraging their members to get procedures outside the U.S. through cross-border plans.
- Some health plans are going into medical tourism aggressively. Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina has contracts with hospitals in Singapore, Thailand, Ireland, Turkey and Costa Rica through its Companion Global Healthcare Inc. subsidiary.
Dive Insight:
At one point, much of the medical tourism activity centered on hospitals in India and private clinics in Mexico. These days, however, U.S. medical tourism has truly gone global, as the diverse set of contracts put in place by Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina illustrates. It's a sad commentary on U.S. healthcare prices when an insurer can send a beneficiary on what's essentially a vacation to get a procedure done, fly them home and still spend less than they would have at a U.S. hospital. But that's how things stand at the moment.
Meanwhile, patients and health plans both can increasingly rely on the quality promise extended by the top U.S. accreditation body, the Joint Commission. The Joint Commission launched an international affiliate agency, the Joint Commission International, in 1999, and since that day has accredited more than 600 hospitals and clinical departments around the world. And the pace of accreditations is growing by 20% per year, according to Patients Without Borders.
At present, it seems likely that only a tiny fraction of patients are actually getting procedures done overseas, despite the growing interest in this option. But with health plans steadily investing more resources in this approach, expect to see the medical tourism slice of the pie grow rapidly.
Want to read more? You might enjoy this story on the 3 countries that are investing aggressively in medical tourism growth.