There is a good number of reasons that motivate Americans to go the medical tourism route and travel offshore to get health care, but the primary reason is to save money. To a lesser extent, they may get overseas sugary because the procedure they need is not available in the USA, or because they want to preserve their anonymity and wish to ensure their friends and neighbors back home do not know about their surgery, but the vast majority of American medical tourism patients do it for financial reasons.

According to the Medical Tourism Association, it is problematic to calculate precisely how much the savings would be to have health care performed abroad not because of the difficulty in learning how much the offshore treatment costs, but rather it is hard to pin down domestic doctors and hospitals about how much their fees would cost. Despite this challenge, we can state some comparison costs in round numbers, and these figures may be astonishing at times.

Dr. Michael D. Horowitz published a study in the journal of the Medical Tourism Association which included a comparison of the costs for a unilateral hip replacement operation between hospitals in India, Costa Rica and the United States. According to his figures, to have the surgery performed in the USA would carry a price tag of a minimum of $ 40,000. The same procedure done in India would cost $ 5,400 (all numbers are in US dollars) and to have the hip surgery done in Costa Rica would be priced at $ 6,600.

Of course, these numbers do not tell the complete story. First of all, there is the cost of travel from one’s home in the United States to India or Costa Rica. Most often the patient will not go alone but rather will take a companion along, so the price of those airline tickets should probably be doubled. Next, there are the costs of hotel accommodations, meals, travel insurance, etc.

Dr. Horowitz calculated the extra non-medical expenses for two Americans going to India at $ 4,600, and for Costa Rica it would be $ 3,250. This brings the total price for the India medical tourism care to be $ 10,000, or 75% less than American treatment. For Costa Rica, the total of $ 9,850 is 75.4% less than if the patient had stayed home.

The travel figures are based on the air flights being economy and not business class, and for flying from Atlanta to New Delhi, India, and San Jose, Costa Rica. Even if the patient had to miss a few extra days of work due to the extra time off needed for overseas travel, the savings of $ 30,00 or $ 30,150 are very significant.

One benefit upon which it is even harder to put a price tag is the life experience value of a trip to India. Surely the extra few hundred dollars it would cost to go from New Delhi to the Taj Mahal pale into insignificance when weighed against the opportunity to tick this wonder of the world off of one’s “bucket list” of things they are dreaming of doing.