The Economist has an excellent overview of the coming boom in medical travel:

Tens of millions of middle-class Americans are uninsured or underinsured and soaring health costs are pushing them and cost-conscious employers and insurers to look abroad for savings (see article). At the same time the best hospitals in Asia and Latin America now rival or surpass many hospitals in the rich world for safety and quality. On one estimate, Americans can save 85% by shopping around and the number who will travel for care is due to rocket from under 1m last year to 10m by 2012—by which time it will deprive American hospitals of some $160 billion of annual business.

That’s a pretty aggressive growth projection for the next four years but definitely in the realm of the possible. By our calculations there are about 100 million elective and cosmetic surgeries performed every year in the US. This is basically any non-emergency surgery that the patient has time to schedule. So currently less than 1% of elective surgeries are being performed abroad. That’s a lot of room to grow.

And these number don’t include dental work, which is another important market. Already thousands of Americans drive across the Mexican border where they can get dental work done for as little as 10% of the cost in the US. This market will also take off in the next few years.

The Economist goes on to review some of the major factors keeping Americans from traveling abroad for medical care:

If medical tourism is to live up to this promise, several barriers must first be swept away. In parts of America arcane restrictions still forbid out-of-state doctors from consulting with patients on the internet or by phone, which inhibits follow-up care for medical tourists. Legal and insurance barriers make it hard for employers to give employees a financial incentive to choose medical tourism over local options—even though insurers are allowed to offer such incentives to prompt patients to pick cheaper doctors inside America.

Of course the insurance barriers only apply to those Americans who have insurance in the first place. That leaves over 47 million Americans for whom medical travel is an attractive option. And an increasing number of large companies are pressuring insurance companies to cover medical procedures done abroad. Think about it: if it’s done right it’s a win/win: companies pay smaller premiums and employees get quality healthcare.