Author Description

"Medical tourism is a growing multi-billion dollar industry involving millions of patients who travel abroad each year to get health care. Some seek legal services like hip replacements and travel to avoid queues, save money, or because their insurer has given them an incentive to do so. Others seek to circumvent prohibitions on accessing services at home and go abroad to receive abortions, assisted suicide, commercial surrogacy, or experimental stem cell treatments. Medical tourism raises important questions such as: Can your employer require you to travel to India for a hip replacement as a condition of insurance coverage? If injury results, can you sue the doctor, hospital, or insurer for medical malpractice in the country where you live? Can a country prohibit its citizens from helping a relative travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide? What about traveling for an abortion? In Patients with Passports, I. Glenn Cohen provides the first comprehensive legal and ethical analysis of medical tourism. The first half of the book focuses on patients traveling for cardiac bypass and other legal services to places like India, Thailand, and Mexico. Cohen analyzes issues of quality of care, disease transmission, liability, private and public health insurance, and the effects of this trade on foreign health care systems. The second half of the book examines medical tourism for services illegal in the patient's home country, such as organ purchase, abortion, assisted suicide, fertility services, and experimental stem cell treatments. Here, Cohen examines issues such as extraterritorial criminalization, exploitation, immigration, and the protection of children"--Unedited summary from book cover.