Washington Times on medical tourism:

"[M]edical tourists" have a vacation in an exotic place where they can soak up the sun, visit a few golden temples or other landmarks and end up with a new hip or knee, a healthy heart -- or a robot-controlled joint replacement, a procedure that has not yet been approved in this country.

In addition, "they return with a lot more money left in their pockets -- sometimes 70 [percent] to 80 percent more than if they'd been treated in the United States," said Diana M. Ernst, a public-policy fellow in Health Care Studies for the Pacific Research Institute (PRI).
...

However, there are still some roadblocks to a groundswell of U.S. support for medical tourism. For example, a North Carolina paper-products company interested in sending an employee to India for shoulder and gallbladder surgery and giving him the $10,000 it expected to save ran into difficulties with a union that represented some of its employees.

"Large American insurance companies have not fully jumped aboard the medical-tourism bandwagon, so the number of medical tourists remains paltry compared to the millions of surgeries performed in the U.S. every year," Ms. Ernst said.

[Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University] said medical tourism will only grow in the coming years. "And if it is used a lot, this has the potential of doing to the U.S. health care system what the Japanese auto industry did to American carmakers," he said.