Hospitals and brokers both are slowly coming to understand that bundling services and providing direct contracting can help hold the line on costs, attracting patients and employers. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Medical tourism, a practice that showed great promise ten years ago, is drawing attention from employers again—but the focus is now on traveling in the U.S. to high-quality, high-volume medical facilities.
Part one of this series looked at the history of medical tourism and how it was affected by the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010. This article will look at how the industry has adapted to changes in the marketplace, and how employers are once again experimenting with the concept as a cost-saving measure.
|Shifting the focus
The demand for traveling to surgical centers in other countries was growing a decade ago, when pre-existing condition clauses and other insurance exclusions meant that some Americans had to look outside the U.S. health system for certain medical procedures. Some employers and insurers launched programs to cater to this market. Medical tourism companies sprang up, anticipating continued growth in demand.
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