On 11 February 2016 the Permanent Mission of Hungary hosted UNA-NY’s booktalk event on Sasha Issenberg’s new book entitled Outpatients: The Astonishing New World of Medical Tourism, part of the Columbia Global Reports series.
At the event, the author of Hungarian origin presented his book in which he investigates the global trends of medical tourism and whether it is the future of health care. In an increasingly globalized world, national governments may be losing control over the flows of money and information, but they still have responsibility for health care. Still, traveling abroad for medical care, once the province of the wealthy or desperate, is becoming commonplace as patients go in search of lower prices, and some countries have found economic opportunity in turning health care into a global business. As a case study the author tells the fascinating story of how Hungary builds a medical tourism business from scratch and markets it to the world to become Europe’s dental chair.
