As mentioned in the previous article, medical tourism has great impact on ethical standards of medical practice. How should we judge this new ‘industry’?
From the patient’s point of view, after investing for treatments (diagnosis, surgeries and medication), a comprehensive holistic care is expected. However, medical tourism usually fall short of post-treatment follow up care. Therefore, patients have the rights to ask for a lower price for ‘incomplete’ care, as a form of upfront compensation. The real situation is, all medical tourism charge overseas patients for more dear prices, why is that the case?
Doctors and medical institutions are aware of the risk of medical tourism: that this practice is deprived of post-treatment care. Complication and dissatisfaction will blow out in patient’s homeland instead of been managed ad locum. In today’s information age, any negative feed-back would be devastating to a physician. Besides, international medical negligence law suits would be costly if not possible. As a result, the supply to medical tourism becomes divided:
Some doctors choose not to serve medical tourists, while some are willing to do so, and some are obliged to work under employment contract of a HMO. The end result is discrepancy between demand and supply, and finally there are the expensive fees.
Anyone with marketing sense would say that imbalance in demand and supply is an opportunity for the market, so increasing the supply of doctors and institutions in the market would solve the problem. However, marketing mechanism is not the solution for medical tourism according to the reason mentioned above. Even the market is able to provide medical services with lower price; medical tourism is still incomplete in its essence, as post-treatment care is still absent. Medical tourism is a castrated medical service.
