ABSTRACT
Each year, more than 10 million US residents travel abroad to obtain a broad range of
healthcare services, including tonsillectomies and knee, eye, and hernia surgeries. Why would
so many people travel to other nations to have medical procedures performed, thereby
importing healthcare services from abroad? One reason, of course, is that people facing
increasingly long waits for treatment caused by greater US governmental interference are
seeking speedier treatment elsewhere. There is, however, an additional and perhaps more
important reason, which is that many US residents have discovered that healthcare services
are much less costly to obtain in other nations, such as India and Thailand. For instance,
tonsillectomies and knee, eye, and hernia surgeries are all at least 50 percent cheaper to
obtain abroad. Indeed, the costs of obtaining such healthcare services abroad are often so much
lower that a number of US patients apply the savings to cover both their travel costs and the
costs of vacationing abroad following treatment.
