Dental Tourism Phenomen
December 29th, 2007
Promising low cost and high quality, dental service outlets in Mexico, Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria, India, Australia, the Philippines and uncounted points in between are pitching their services to relatively affluent, yet cost-conscious health care consumers in Western Europe and the United States.
The Sahaj Dental Clinic in New Delhi, India, for example, tells Web site visitors that U.S. and European dentists “can charge $300 to $400″ for a single caries restoration that “costs only $20 to $40 in India.”
Nevermind that even a discounted round-trip ticket to New Delhi from, say, Chicago would set the traveler back more than $1,400, a booking agent at “Goindiatravel” reported July 3.
Americans obviously are not trekking to India or Eastern Europe for single routine restorations. Most who go the extra miles need extensive care that, as they see it, justifies the added expense, particularly when a dental visit is combined with an exotic vacation.
Health care tourism has emerged in recent years as “a fast-growing phenomenon in which travelers, typically from wealthier countries, visit less-developed nations for medical care mixed with vacation, all at cut-rate prices,” USA Today reported.
The newspaper described towns in Hungary and other Eastern European countries where “brass plaques and molar-shaped signs bearing easy-to-grasp names like ‘Eurodent’ and ‘Happy Dent’ line the streets along a central shopping district.”
Random spot checks with state dental leaders for this report suggest that for most, particularly in the northern regions, dental tourism is not high on their list of pressing concerns, and for good reason. It’s not a major issue with a lot of their members, at least for now.
Further south, however, that some patients leave the country for dental treatment is a larger issue, though it hardly qualifies as news.
“The term ‘dental tourism’ may be new, but certainly what we see happening is not new,” said Dr. John S. Findley, who represents the 15th District (Texas) on the ADA Board of Trustees. “I don’t think it’s new anywhere, but it’s especially not new in Texas.”
Dr. Findley said he’s heard estimates that, in the state’s lower Rio Grande Valley, as much as 30 percent of the population will cross the border for dental care in a given year, a percentage that he said includes people who winter in the area.
“But it’s not really a Texas or border-state problem,” he added. “Disappearing borders and the ease of air travel today make a flat world a shrinking world. It’s easy to travel anywhere.”
Dr. Ivan E. Rodriguez, immediate past president of the Rio Grande Valley District Dental Society in Brownsville, Texas, noted that literally hundreds of dental offices and clinics are crowded into the cities and towns south of the border. “I’m told the area has the highest number of dentists per capita in the world,” he said.
(The town of Nuevo Progreso, for example, advertises itself as the border “crossing point of choice” and boasts that the community is home to 90 to 100 dental offices.)
Some dentists interviewed for this report blamed employers and insurers for allegedly encouraging patients to travel in pursuit of reduced-fee treatments. But Dr. Frank Ceja of National City, Calif., about 15 miles from the border with Mexico, said that insurance may not be the driving force.
“Most of the people who go down there don’t have insurance,” he said. “That’s why they go down there.”
The ADA is keeping an eye on the phenomenon of dental tourism as just one element of globalization — a wide range of economic, social and geopolitical factors affecting the way of life for millions around the world, including U.S. dentists and the patients they serve.
The next installment of this series will explore the insurance industry’s views on dental tourism.
By ADA.org
Categories: Dental Tourism
The insurance industry is slowly coming around to the idea of dental tourism as a viable way of reducing treatment costs. I think one of the main obstacles here will come from the patients themselves, many of whom will not want to travel long distances to receive treatment. The current numbers of people traveling are largely made up of those who are actively seeking treatment abroad, largely due to cost, indicating that many of them do not have insurance, or their insurance won’t cover the treatment they want.