I was struck by the passing comment from a student I met over the week that his brother, a physician, was moving his practice from the U.S. to Costa Rica. His brother is driven by the desire to provide medical care to people who need it but enterprise is at the core of the decision. It seems that medical tourism is dramatically on the increase: Americans are going to Costa Rica for dentistry, cosmetic surgery, and other forms of medical service that are not typically covered by insurance in the U.S..
When you are paying your own money, it matters whether a procedure is $20,000 or $250, and it is not entirely uncommon for the price disparity between the U.S. and Costa Rica to approach that level. Why? It goes without saying that Costa Rica is far less regulated that the U.S. system: the public system is socialist and awful but the private system is really, genuinely, and almost thoroughly private. So what this physician and his partners are expecting is to pick up many customers from the U.S. who are coming to this country to get their medical care.
The irony is remarkable: Americans doing medical business with Americans in another country. As Richter points out, the final stage of socialism is emigration. The more the U.S. system is regulated and socialized and cartelized, the more we can expect sectors of this industry to emigrate in these strange ways.
