WorldMed Assist is a company that helps patients through the process of traveling abroad for medical services.

As the demand for cross-border and overseas medical services escalates, there is an increase in health care facilities and insurance providers catering to the millions of people who will travel abroad for surgeries and procedures every year.

Rx: International travel
The biggest driver in going abroad is the significant cost-savings - medical tourism offers savings up to 70 percent after travel expenses, according to a report from Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, an international accounting and consulting firm. Other reports have cited savings of 85 percent.

Almost 39 percent of respondents in the Deloitte report said they would consider going abroad for an elective procedure if they could save half the cost and be assured quality was comparable. And 88 percent said they would consider going out of their community or local areas to get care or treatment for a condition if they knew the outcomes were better and the costs were no higher.

There are many reasons why health care abroad is so much cheaper than in the United States, says Hoeberechts.

He points out that because the cost of living in some parts of the world is much lower, a doctor in India, for example, only needs to make a sixth of what an American doctor brings home to enjoy the same quality of living.

Another factor keeping the cost of international medicine low is the fact that defensive medicine is rarely practiced.

"The legal system is based on getting the patient better rather than punishing the medical team," says Hoeberechts.

To understand how significant cost-savings are from medical tourism, it's necessary to look at numbers. In the United States, knee replacement surgery costs $40,000. The same surgery performed in India costs only $8,500. And in Malaysia the surgery is even cheaper at $8,000. The amounts include the surgery and hospital stay. But even after factoring in the price of a roundtrip flight, this option remains attractive to many.

"Medical tourism is definitely growing," says Hoeberechts. "Health care reform isn't going to reduce the cost [of U.S. health care] anytime soon...I don't believe that medical travel is the solution to the U.S. health care crisis, but it's one of the components to the solution."

Paula Wilson, president and CEO of The Joint Commission subsidiary, Joint Commission Resources (also known as JCI) shares a similar opinion about medical tourism.

"It's not that big of a deal to get on a plane and go somewhere [for medical services]," she says. "Twenty years ago, this was unthinkable. That says something about the cost of health care in the United States."

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