Thread: Patients without Borders: Alternative to Obamacare

Patients Without Borders
The rise of Mexican medical tourism.
The New Republic

*
Mary Cuddehe
* September 11, 2009 | 12:00 am


Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is a bleak, dusty factory town across the border from El Paso, Texas. Long a nexus for drug runners vying for control of smuggling routes, it has earned a reputation for gunfights, abductions, and murdered women. In recent weeks, the violence fueled by drug cartels has spiked, and not for the first time. There have been beheadings, public shootouts, and murders of dealers, police, and bystanders. The U.S. Consulate has issued a travel advisory for the area. And, in the midst of all this, Juárez has a message for you: Looking for a good deal on heart surgery?

The city of 1.6 million is one of a few Mexican border towns quietly promoting state-of-the-art hospitals that cater to international patients--Juárez has five such facilities--and betting that refugees from the tattered U.S. health care system will come. On paper, at least, the numbers look promising: According to a 2008 study by Deloitte LLP, 750,000 Americans traveled abroad for medical care in 2007. That number is expected to reach six million by 2010.

This past spring, around the time Mexican President Felipe Calderón sent thousands of troops to Juárez in an attempt to quell a surge in violence, I met with Alvaro Navarro. The director of economic development for Juárez, he is the man pushing the city’s medical-tourism dreams. Tall, handsome, and seemingly undeterred by the long odds, Navarro works out of an office in one of the city’s few modern glass buildings. As he described it to me, the plan was simple: Woo tourists--at last count, Mexico was among the world’s top ten destinations--to come for medical procedures and help them arrange sightseeing trips while they are there. He spoke in the sly tone of a man who’d just gotten in on the ground floor of something really huge. “Medical tourism--it’s going to be bigger than the maquila,â€

Oh, wonderful. Our medical costs get driven up because of all the illegal aliens that can't pay because they are sending their illegal paychecks to Mexico. And then Americans that can pay are being enticed to take their money to Mexico for cheap treatment--more dollars flowing out of this country and not covering hospital shortfalls.
And so you get a successful heart transplant in Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez, after your release there is a very good chance you might end up in the middle of a drug cartel war.
I prefer to pay an American witch doctor rather than ship money out of the country for non-accredited medical treatment in a country where I can't speak the language.