Medical Tourism: Passport to Cheaper Health Care?

The Risks Patients Face continued...

Jennifer Schilling, 38, also used a concierge to schedule a hysterectomy abroad, but she did more research than Sanden. Still, she found it hard to get a clear picture. Learning earlier this year that she needed an operation, Schilling called her local hospital in Springfield, MO, to find out how much her stay would cost, apart from the surgeon's fee. "They told me the mean was $30,000, but that it could go as high as $200,000 if there were complications," says the married mother of two, who owns an equipment rental company. Knowing that her insurance had a $5,000 deductible and a 20 percent co-pay, she did the math and drew her own conclusion: "If something went wrong, my co-pay could've been $40,000. I couldn't take that risk." So she contacted MedRetreat. What she learned: Treatment in Penang, Malaysia, would cost $8,000, including the surgery, hospital stay, tests, travel, and 18 days at a five-star hotel.

MedRetreat recommended Suresh Kumarasamy, a surgeon at Gleneagles Medical Center. Schilling went to the hospital's Website and read the doctor's bio, which stated that he had trained in England. She searched other sites in hopes of verifying that information, but she couldn't get the facts nailed down. And although she had a list of his degrees (from his bio and from materials sent to her by MedRetreat), she was baffled by the acronyms, such as M.B.B.S., M.Ob.Gyn., and MRCOG. So she tried another angle: talking to one of Dr. Kumarasamy's former patients (MedRetreat supplied the name and phone number). "I could tell this woman was hard to please, and she thought very highly of Dr. Kumarasamy," says Schilling. Reassurance also came from MedRetreat's destination program manager, an American woman who lives in Penang and volunteers at the hospital.

Once at Gleneagles, Schilling was further impressed when, during presurgical testing, Dr. Kumarasamy told her that she had a heart murmur. "No one in the States had ever caught that," she says, "and he heard it through his stethoscope."

When Good Housekeeping asked Patrick Marsek of MedRetreat to explain the acronyms in Dr. Kumarasamy's degrees, he admitted he didn't know what they meant. "Most patients don't ask these kinds of questions," he said. Perhaps that's because most are accustomed to simply accepting referrals from doctors and trusted family members and friends. But operating overseas, outside one's local medical network, requires much more vigilance.

Marsek promised to investigate the degrees for us (stressing that he would do the same for any patient who asked), and in a later e-mail, he supplied the answers: M.B.B.S. is an Indian Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degree, achieved after five to six years of study; an M.Ob.Gyn. is the Malaysian equivalent of a postgraduate program combined with a residency in obstetrics and gynecology. MRCOG means that the doctor is a member of the elite Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in London. But even if a medical concierge delivered this kind of information to a patient, how could she evaluate and verify it?

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