Abstract
Neil Lunt and Russel Mannion provide an overview of the current state of the medical tourism literature and propose areas for future research in health policy and management. The authors also identify the main unanswered questions in this field ranging from the real size of the medical tourism market to the particular health profiles of transnational patients. In addition, they highlight unexplored areas of research from health economics, ethics, policy and management perspectives. To this very insightful editorial I would add the international trade perspective. While globalization has permeated labor and capital, services such as healthcare are still highly regulated by governments, constrained to regional or national borders and protected by organized interests. Heterogeneity of healthcare regulations and lack of cross-country reciprocity agreements act as barriers to the development of more widespread and dynamic medical tourism markets. To picture these barriers to transnational health services I use evidence from North America, identifying different "pull and push factors" for medical tourist in this region, discussing how economic integration and healthcare reform might shift the incentives to utilize healthcare abroad.
Highlights
As Neil Lunt and Russel Mannion point out in their editorial, medical tourism promotion is prone to “provider exaggeration, and industry ‘grand standing’, [making it increasingly] difficult to distinguish rhetoric from reality” (p.156) (1)
Scholars who have attempted to investigate the size, characteristics, and prospects of different medical tourism markets often times encounter data limitations and difficulties agreeing on adequate conceptual frameworks and disciplinary boundaries
The authors provide an excellent overview of the main unanswered questions in this field ranging from the real size of the medical tourism market to the specific health profiles of international patients
Summary
As Neil Lunt and Russel Mannion point out in their editorial, medical tourism promotion is prone to “provider exaggeration, and industry ‘grand standing’, [making it increasingly] difficult to distinguish rhetoric from reality” (p.156) (1). In the U.S.-Mexico transnational market the main incentives for medical tourist form the U.S to travel south of the border are the high healthcare costs, access to care barriers for minority and low-income populations in the U.S, and cultural familiarity with the Mexican health system in the case of the Mexican diaspora in the U.S (2).
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