Second Wind for Travel Abroad

With the winds of change in their face, cash-strapped employers and patients are bracing for even higher healthcare and insurance costs despite the Affordable Care Act’s best intentions to make healthcare affordable. Amidst these insecurities and uncertainties swirling around the healthcare landscape today, medical tourism is gaining a second wind even after some – on both sides of the reform debate – consider Obamacare to be yet another in a series of last-gasp exercises aimed at solving the nation’s healthcare afflictions.

The unsettling view of the nation’s $2.6 trillion healthcare system, 10 times the $256 billion spent in 1980, has come on the backs of families, which have seen premiums grow by 97 percent in their employer-sponsored coverage programs, and at the expense of Medicare, which has watched enrollment from an aging population swell, thereby, draining federal and state budgets.3

Addressing this escalating burden has become a priority for all stakeholders, especially insurance companies looking to attract customers to their dwindling bases. Many coverage entities that once put medical tourism on the back burner with an eye instead toward gaining political favor, have chosen to take a cue from employers and give both domestic and international travel for treatments and procedures a long, hard, second look in an attempt to lure business and keep their companies solvent.

The bottom line is always well-defined. And the business community knows better than anyone else that there are few free rides, no matter what might have been previously expected under the new healthcare legislation. Only employers living under a rock would not have heard that Obamacare will require them to offer employee benefits or suffer a $2,000 penalty per worker.

When key provisions of the Affordable Care Act kick in 2015, employers will begin to question whether to grant health insurance to their employees or pay the penalty instead. At first, before the employer-mandate had been pushed back to 2015, one survey suggested some 30 percent of business owners would “definitely” or “probably” stop offering employee health insurance. However, half of the employers with the strongest understanding of healthcare reform’s changes said they will drop coverage and 60 percent said they will look for alternatives to traditional employer-provided health insurance.4