Medical tourism is going to only deal with large specialist
hospitals run by corporate entities. It is a myth that the
revenues earned by these corporates will partly revert back
to finance the public sector. There is ample evidence to show
that these hospitals have not honoured the conditionalities
for receiving government subsidies - in terms of treatment
of a certain proportion of in patients and out patients free
of cost. If anything, increased demand on private hospitals
due to medical tourism may result in their expansion. If they
expand then they will need more professionals, which means
that they will try to woo doctors from the public sector.
Even today the top specialists in corporate hospitals are
senior doctors drawn the public sector. Medical tourism is
likely to further devalue and divert personnel from the public
sector rather than strengthen them.
Urban concentration of health care providers is a well-known
fact 59 per cent of Indias practitioners (73
per cent allopathic) are located in cities, and especially
metropolitan ones. Medical tourism promotes an internal
brain drain with more health professionals being drawn
to large urban centres, and within them, to large corporate
run specialty institutions.
Medical tourism is going to result in a number of demands
and changes in the areas of financing and regulations. There
will be a greater push for encouraging private insurance tied
to systems of accreditation of private hospitals. There is
a huge concern in the developed countries about the quality
of care and clinical expertise in developing countries and
this will push for both insurance and regulatory regimes.
The potential for earning revenues through medical tourism
will become an important argument for private hospitals demanding
more subsidies from the government in the long run. In countries
like India, the corporate private sector has already received
considerable subsidies in the form of land, reduced import
duties for medical equipment etc. Medical tourism will only
further legitimise their demands and put pressure on the government
to subsidise them even more. This is worrying because the
scarce resources available for health will go into subsidising
the corporate sector. It thus has serious consequences for
equity and cost of services and raises a very fundamental
question: why should developing countries be subsidising the
health care of developed countries?
Medical Tourism in India,
Medical Tourism Industry in
India, Medical Tourism
Industry Growth in India, Medical
Tourism in India, Public
Health Services Medical Tourism
in India, Medical Treatment
in India, Health Care in India,
Treatment in India
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