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How Health Insurance Inhibits Trade In Health Care
Abstract
A range of health care services are tradable, in that consumers can travel abroad for treatment. In this paper we first estimate the gains from trade. An international price comparison of fifteen procedures reveals that there could be savings of around 1.4 billion dollars annually even if only one in ten U.S. patients choose to undergo treatment abroad. We then identify a key impediment to realizing these gains: the nature of existing health insurance plans, which discriminate explicitly or implicitly against treatment abroad. We propose that coverage should be neutral to provider location and that reimbursement should include travel costs.
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Citations
Cited by
Francois, J., & Hoekman, B. (2010) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.48.3.642 · Cited by 717
Globalization and healthcare: understanding health and medical tourism
Carrera, P. M., & Bridges, J. F. (2006) · Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research · doi:10.1586/14737167.6.4.447 · Cited by 388
‘First World Health Care at Third World Prices’: Globalization, Bioethics and Medical Tourism
Turner, L. (2007) · BioSocieties · doi:10.1017/s1745855207005765 · Cited by 375
Medical tourism today: What is the state of existing knowledge?
Hopkins, L., Labonté, R., Runnels, V., & Packer, C. (2010) · Journal of Public Health Policy · doi:10.1057/jphp.2010.10 · Cited by 344
The medical tourism index: Scale development and validation
Fetscherin, M., & Stephano, R.-M. (2016) · Tourism Management · doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2015.08.010 · Cited by 284
Metadata
- Authors
- Mattoo, A., & Rathindran, R.
- Venue
- Health Affairs
- Publisher
- Health Affairs Publishing, LLC
- Published
- 2006-03
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 358-368
- ISSN
- 0278-2715 (ISSN-L)
- 1544-5208
- OpenAlex
- W2064686899
- Cited by
- 185
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 12.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Mattoo, A., & Rathindran, R. (2006). How Health Insurance Inhibits Trade In Health Care. Health Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.25.2.358
Data sources
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
