new_york_times

Living here in Bangkok, where legions of medical tourists can be seen at the city’s private hospitals, this Economist article resounded with me: “Globalisation and health: Importing competition”:

Health care has long seemed one of the most local of all industries. Yet beneath the bandages, globalisation is thriving. The outsourcing of record keeping and the reading of X-rays is already a multi-billion-dollar business. The recruitment of doctors and nurses from the developing world by rich countries is also common, if controversial. The next growth area for the industry is the flow of patients in the other direction—known as “medical tourism”—which is on the threshold of a dramatic boom.

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. 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.

(Emphasis mine.)

Link via Ideas, a promising new blog from editors at the New York Times‘s Week in Review section. From their description:

This is a blog for Web-browsing omnivores. It features brief posts on the most interesting ideas we’ve come across lately from any realm, in the course of educating ourselves as generalist editors — article links primarily, but pictures, video and audio too.

I like the format — quick posts with links to external Web sites (as opposed to links merely to internal material). I’m reminded of The Wall Street Journal‘s Informed Reader, which, unfortunately, met its demise in February.

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