Medical tourism: Outsourcing surgery

A trend emerging in recent years has been travel from industrialized nations to developing countries such as India and Thailand for purposes of undergoing medical procedures, a phenomenon we call medical tourism. Medical tourism offers the prospect of greatly reduced expenses for health care as well as other advantages such as reduced waiting times, but there are risks associated with seeking health care overseas. In order to determine whether medical tourism should be encouraged, and if so in what form, we develop an ANP model. We find that self-selected medical tourism is preferred over employer- or government-sponsored programs and over the status quo. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.