India is actively promoting medical tourism and is a leading country attracting over 1, 50,000 medical tourists. Indian health-care industry boosted by medical tourism is growing at 30 per cent annually. There has been a long debate whether medical tourism has made health sector highly commercial and the common man in the country will be hard pressed for medical care. According to a report by World Bank, about 80% of all health spending in India is in the private sector. Most of the super specialty private hospitals are out of reach of majority of Indians. So a doubling of medical tourism earnings may only make these hospitals even more inaccessible to common people. Also more and more of the qualified medical professionals may opt out of Government run Hospitals for highly paid jobs in private sector. This will further weaken Public Health Care System.
To contradict this theory, another research states that in India most of the health problems are primary and not tertiary. Some of the basic primary issues are malnutrition, poverty, lack of infrastructure, lack of clean drinking water, illiteracy, poor knowledge on dietary habits and health education. Medical tourism concentrates on tertiary health care as in terms of specialized treatments such as orthopedic surgery, heart surgery, dental surgery, and plastic surgery etc. These are critical care treatments handled by private hospitals. As it’s cost effective and the waiting period is almost zero compared to US or UK, medical tourists prefer India as their favorite destination.
In India, there are lots of very well-trained doctors just like there are well-trained engineers. Many engineers have relocated abroad, but for doctors it remains the case that barriers to entering the U.S. medical profession are still large. A recent survey indicates that students prefer steady government jobs compared to private jobs. Moreover, after Sixth Pay Commission, government salaries have shot up. Benefits like life-long pension, holidays and fixed working hours are adding to the allure of government jobs. This recession has left everyone wishing that they were in a government job. Moreover, there has not been any study conducted whether promoting medical tourists actually affects or delays the treatment of Indians. Neither any actual study conducted on doctor’s preference towards working in private hospitals or switching from Government to Private hospitals. Unless these are actually proved, such theories can only be considered as myth.
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