This short paper for one of the world's leading bioethics journals introduces readers to medical tourism - the travel of patients from their home country to another for the primary purpose of seeking medical treatment. The paper divides medical tourism into three types: (1) Medical tourism for services illegal in both the patient's home and destination countries (e.g., organ transplant tourism); (2) Medical tourism for services that are illegal in the patient's home country but legal in the destination country (e.g., some forms of fertility tourism, euthanasia tourism, experimental drug tourism); (3) Medical tourism for services legal in both the home and destination country (e.g., traveling abroad for a heart valve or hip replacement). The paper then discusses several difficult ethical and regulatory challenges posed by each type of medical tourism.
The safety of UK couples who travel abroad for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment is being jeopardised by the lack of uniform clinical and safety regulations, say fertility organisations. Women are at greater risk of multiple births, which increases the danger of medical complications to mother and baby, says a new report by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology and the International Federation of Fertility Societies. A survey of more than 100 countries looking at the rules and regulations relating to assisted conception, particularly IVF, found that some countries have high numbers of multiple pregnancy because of the number of embryos they transfer during assisted conception.
Medical tourism - the travel of patients from one (the “home”) country to another (the “destination”) country for medical treatment - represents a growing business. A number of authors have raised the concern that medical tourism reduces access to health care for the destination country’s poor and suggested that home country governments or international bodies have obligations to curb medical tourism or mitigate its negative effects when they occur. This Article is the first to comprehensively examine both the question of whether this negative effect on access to health care occurs for the destination country’s poor, and the normative question of the home country and international bodies’ obligations if it does occur. I draw on the work of leading theorists from the Statist, Cosmopolitan, and Intermediate camps on Global Justice and apply it to medical tourism. ...
In this Article I examine “medical tourism” — the travel of patients who are residents of one country to another country for medical treatment — which is fast becoming a multi-billion dollar industry. To date, the primary U.S. medical tourists appear to have been uninsured or underinsured Americans seeking substantial cost savings by traveling to less developed countries for care. More recently, state governments, self-insured firms, Fortune 500 companies, and domestic insurers have begun attempts to get their insured populations to use medical tourism as well by requiring it or giving incentives for its use (what I call “insurer-prompted medical tourism”).