http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5247&Itemid=232
Philippines Joins Medical Tourism Parade
Written by Our Correspondent
Wednesday, 13 March 2013
Maybe we get to stay home
The Doctor will see you now
The Philippines, having become a major player in the offshoring game, is
preparing to take on other countries across Asia in a new field – medical
tourism, a plan that makes sense since the country is a major supplier of
medical personnel to the west.
In February, Tourism Secretary Ramon Jimenez held a briefing to announce
that his department is cooperating with the Department of Health to identify
what medical services could be offered. In doing so, Jimenez and other
officials are betting into such well-established health providers as Thailand,
Singapore, India and Malaysia, hoping to combine access to Filipino beaches as
well as hospital services.
There is huge demand for orthodontics or dentistry, cancer and
retirement, cataract laser surgery and other medical procedures at costs a
fraction of those overseas, Jimenez said, adding that medical services are
among the tourism products the Philippine government wants to promote.
Despite well-trained medical staffs and first-rate facilities, the
Philippines is well behind other countries in the region in trying to draw
health tourists. The government says it is seeking to counter that lag by
working on bilateral government-to-government agreements focusing on medical
health exchanges and hospital-to-hospital partnerships with foreign
institutions as well as working with foreign referral companies and doctors to
draw patients,. Its target market is overseas Filipinos in the US and Canada,
the Australian market, the island states, Japanese and Koreans, of whom nearly
1 million are already in the country.
Despite the drawbacks, the plan dovetails with a sense that the
Philippines is finally getting moving after the years of paralysis from a long
series of crooked or ineffective administrations. The government of Benigno S.
Aquino III has taken on the Catholic Church and pushed through a birth control
program that the church is nonetheless still fighting furiously and has "put in
place what we consider its greatest economic achievement, the most sweeping
changes in public procurement procedures in the last 50 years, if not longer,"
according to a report on the country by the Hong Kong-based Asianomics
financial analysis firm. " This anti-corruption, anti-graft focus has
transformed public expenditure in the Philippines, as well as the participation
in the procurement bidding process by some of the most efficient and cleanest
companies in the country."
The competition for health dollars is keen. Given the cost of health care
in the advanced countries, more than 50 countries across the planet have
identified various forms of health tourism as a national industry,
unfortunately with widely varying standards of accreditation and health
quality. It is a lucrative field, both for health care and tourism as many
patients combine the two. India and Thailand in the region have been identified
particularly as destinations – Thailand for its beaches and other attractions
as much as for its medical care, which is deemed to be first-rate. India has
been in the medical tourism game for more than a decade and at last count had
welcomed 150,000 people to the country. The industry, growing 30 percent
annually is expected to bring in US$2 billion a year by 2015.
Thailand is equally if not more advanced than India, particularly in
cosmetic surgery including nose jobs and breast augmentations. One hospital
alone took in 150,000 patients in 2006 and the industry has grown rapidly since.
Prospective patients are usually seeking elective surgeries including
joint replacement such s hips or knees, prostate surgery or coronary bypasses
(see chart). The Philippines is strongly competitive in most of these, with
dramatic differences in cost with the United States, the world's most expensive
place for medical care, far above at the top of the list.
Source: PSA
The campaign to attract medical tourists "comes at a time when Filipino
doctors and medical facilities are gaining greater recognition for providing
health care services that are on par with international standards, according to
a report by Pacific Strategies and Assessments, a country risk firm
headquartered in Manila. Many of the basic components needed to expand medical
tourism are already thus in place. The Philippines, according to the PSA
report, "boasts several state-of-the-art medical centers that provide advanced
medical procedures such as stem-cell therapy by western-educated Filipino
doctors."
The drawbacks, according to the PSA report, are rooted in many problems
that traditionally have plagued the Philippines; shambolic infrastructure, a
hostile climate to foreign investment, a rigid labor structure and putting in
place government policy to accommodate western interests. Medical centers in
India, Thailand and Singapore in particular have lucrative partnerships with
international insurance companies that find it in their interest to act as
clearing houses for the treatment of policyholders, allowing them to save
significant amounts of money for payouts to medical providers.
In the Philippines, however, "Partly due to the country's lack of
accreditation with larger insurers, experts on medical tourism say that the
dearth of international private insurance in the Philippines is intentionally
designed to protect the local insurance industry." That puts roadblocks in the
way of international insurance companies trying to save money on medical care,
and denies the Philippines a lucrative and relatively prestigious source of
income as well as populating its beaches with foreigners recuperating from
their nose jobs and breast implants and eager to show them off.
The other problem is that while the Philippines trains vast numbers of
doctors and nurses, they often depart for the west, where salaries are so much
better than an individual trained as a physician at a Filipino medical school
can make more money as a nurse in the United States than he can as a doctor in
his own country. The hospitals in the United States, particularly in
California, are filled with huge numbers of Filipino medical personnel, not to
mention Indians and residents of many other countries. A prosperous medical
industry in the Philippines would go a long way toward keeping its diaspora at
home.
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