Medical Tourism in Canada: A Growing Enterprise?

Posted by John R. Graham in Health Care, Medical Tourism, Single-Payer Follies on Jan 28th, 2009 | no responses

Medical Travel Today is a very interesting (free) newsletter published by Laura Carabello, whom I've met a couple of times. Imagine my surprise when I saw a feature in last week's issue about medical tourism into Canada, provided by an outfit named Canadian Healthcare International, in Toronto, Ontario. (Most readers know that Canadian patients are keen to escape Canadian (lack of) health care and this has provided opportunities for brokers to help them get the care that the state denies them.)

MTT interviewed one Dr. Butt, who explained the business model, although the MTT interviewer admitted that she was "a little confused on how you will be able to provide care for foreign patients when the current system can't address the needs of domestic patients in a timely manner".

Good question: And one which (as a Canadian) I think that I can answer fairly. Although Dr. Butt is a little opaque about how CHI operates within the Canadian system, a perceptive reader can see that CHI is a snow-bound version of Cuba's Havana Hospital, which treats non-Cubans for cash, and for which Michael Moore has shilled.

The provincial government forbids a domestic resident from paying his own money to acquire health care that the state denies him. The doctors send their (low) claims to OHIP (the Ontario Health Insurance Plan), which is the provincial government's monopolist health plan. The hospitals have a "global budget" from the province based on a centrally dictated plan: They can neither profit nor lose money because of their own activities. Rather, the provincial government allocates money as it serves the state's needs.

However, if the doctors and hospitals can provide care to foreigners, instead of domestic patients, any revenue pretty much goes straight to the bottom line. Meanwhile, Canadian patients still wait intolerably long for treatment.

As in Cuba, so it is in Canada. The former is a brutal communist dictatorship, and the latter an otherwise free and prosperous country – but they both suffer similar health-care systems. Is this the future of health care worldwide? Patients jumping borders, instead of queues, in order to get health care that their governments deny to citizens, but sell to foreigners?