Medical Tourism

Surgeries, Side Trips for ‘Medical Tourists’
Affordable Care at India’s Private Hospitals Draws Growing Number of Foreigners
New Delhi: Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to USD 200,000 – An impossible sum for the 53 year old carpenter from Durham, N. C., who has no health insurance.

So he outsourced the job to India.

Taking his cue from cost–cutting U. S. businesses, Staab last month flew about 7,500 miles to the Indian capital, where doctors at the Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre – A sleek aluminum–colored building across the street from a bicycle rickshaw stand replaced his balky heart valve with one harvested from a pig. Total bill: about USD 10,000, including round trip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal.

“The Indian doctors, they did such a fine job here, and took care of us so well”, said Staab, a gentle, ponytailed bicycling enthusiast who was accompanied to India by his partner, Maggi Grace. “I would do it again”.

Staab is one of a growing number of people known as “Medical tourists” who are traveling to India in search of First World health care at Third World prices. Last year, an estimated 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical procedures, and the number is increasing at the rate of about 15 percent a year, according to Zakariah Ahmed, a health care specialist at the Confederation of Indian Industries.

Eager to cash in on the trend, posh private hospitals are beginning to offer services tailored for foreign patients, such as airport pickups, Internet–equipped private rooms and package deals that combine, for example, tummy–tuck surgery with several nights in a maharajah’s palace. Some hospitals are pushing treatment regimens that augment standard medicine with yoga and other forms of traditional Indian healing.

The phenomenon is another example of how India is profiting from globalization the growing integration of world economies just as it has already done in such other service industries as insurance and banking, which are outsourcing an ever–widening assortment of office tasks to the country. A recent study by the Mc Kinsey consulting firm estimated that India’s medical tourist industry could yield as much as USD 2.2 billion in annual revenue by 2012.

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