MEDICAL TOURISM IN GLOBAL MARKET (original) (raw)

Abstract

In a global economy, medical tourism gets increasingly into spotlight. It represents a state when people living in one country travel abroad to receive a medical, dental, surgical or aesthetic care. Several various organizations, like Medical Tourism Index or Medical Tourism Association, engage in medical tourism by assessing top destinations for medical tourism, thus helping patients to choose on the basis of various indicators. The area of medical tourism in a global economy becomes an attractive business, especially for countries able to offer equal or better quality of health care for a smaller price. Free movement of goods and services, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization and its General Agreement on Trade in Services, has accelerated the liberalization of trade in medical services. Therefore, medical services have become more tradable and mobility of cross-frontier patients has increased, causing the term " medical tourism " to emerge after this agreement. The paper Medical Tourism in Global Market will address analysing the present state of tourism for health care and also anticipated future development, considering this area of business now worth 439 billion US dollars with 25 percent growth anticipated in next ten years. According to findings of Oxford Economics and VISA, it is expected that, alongside medical tourism, other sectors beside health care will grow – e.g. 340 new international airports in a period of decades, while the market of medical tourism can grow up to 3 trillion dollars by 2025.

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