Interesting, I'm curious since you're in the industry, why do you think medical tourism has never taken off in a big way in the U.S.? I feel like I saw more people willing to go to Poland or Ukraine for things like dental work when I lived in Europe than people in the U.S. willing to go to Mexico or some other destination.
The US is really, really large and many people living there have never left it. There's also a belief that US healthcare is the gold standard (which is probably true at the very high end, but not necessarily on average).
In other words, it's a hard sell to convince a factory worker to travel 5-10 hours on a plane to a place they have no familiarity with to get what they believe to be inferior treatment. They might not even have a passport.
This is much less of an issue in Europe where countries are tiny and almost everyone travels between them on a regular basis.
Also, medical tourism is mostly limited to what the industry calls Shoppable Services - outpatient treatments that are not emergent/not life threatening. There is a bit of a cottage industry in Mexico for some services, like bariatric surgery for obesity or dental work, but it isn't a huge volume. The really expensive stuff in the US is emergency treatment which you can't shop for anyway.
All that said, I think the interest in buying prescriptions from overseas has never been higher.
Anecdotally, most of the people in my circle of friends and family are perfectly satisfied with what we get locally. If you have adequate insurance and no major medical issues, you don't save much by flying down to Mexico. I do have some extended family that have gone to Mexico for treatment, however, mostly of the dental variety. But it was major reconstruction, so it was worth the effort.
I do remember reading a story a couple years back where an insurance company paid for their customer to fly to Mexico, flew down a US orthopedic surgeon, and paid him pretty well for his services. The cost of the flights, surgeon, and medical facility in Mexico were significantly less than it would cost them in the US, so everybody won except the US hospital. As I recall, the hospital in Mexico was collocated with a resort, so it was a nice place to recuperate as well.
Not sure how common that really is, though, stories like that make the news for a reason.
I want my medical providers to be local to me so they’re liable to my local community. I also want to keep my organs and have insurance cover the costs.
