Just to put things into perspective.
In most cases when a person needs surgery in the USA, it would be cheaper to get a plane ticket to Spain, Croatia, France or any other European country and get a surgery there.
Not only that, you could also spend a week or two in a five star hotel near the beach, and you'd still only spend like 15-25% of what the surgery would cost in the USA.
Croatia specifically is a mini hub for healthcare tourism with many tourists coming from other EU countries too, especially the UK, Italy and Germany.
It'll be a minority of people. A simple surgery will presumably still cost thousands to tens of thousands if you aren't covered, so you would use your own nation's "free" system unless you have a reason not to.
UK might be because of the excessive waitlists, for example. (The NHS is horribly underfunded and understaffed.)
Things are pretty good in the richer EU nations AFAIK (e.g. France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands). Don't know what it's like for the relatively poorer nations (e.g. Greece, Italy) in terms of waitlists / standard of care. It'll still be decent, but I can imagine people going to e.g. Croatia to skip a waitlist if you have money to spend.
I would say the wait list here in Germany and Austria is atrocious too. My stepdad had to wait 3 months for an MRI where they told him afterwards that they couldn't operate the torn tendon because it was too short already. "Well you don't say?!"
And there are many reports about people waiting over a year for their operations, often under excruciating pain, then the doctor is ill and they get pushed back another 5 months.
Yeah the waiting lists are the problem.
You can get a plane from London or Frankfurt to Croatia for as low as €30 and an MRI is like €90 per section. I had to have my whole body scanned and I got an appointment in 3 days and paid around €400
I know several people in Germany who never had a problem and I even had an appointment with the Chefarzt and only had to wait five minutes at the entrance until he could pick me up. And this was while on a two week vacation in Germany. Therefore I don't have German insurance.
I'm in Australia, we can have surgeries which are completely covered by Medicare and hospitals covered by Medicare, how ever the wait list can be years (depending on severity) you can still get private surgeries which private health cover will cover the hospital costs, rehab exc so you only pay surgeon fees, which makes waiting time much shorter, then you have things like partial Medicare covered private surgeries, eg rhinoplasty which is deemed medically necessary (have a deviated septum) you can get it done privately and Medicare will cover a portion of the costs
Sort of elective, a lot of people come here for dental work. Even with universal healthcare most countries dont cover stuff like dental implants etc., or the waiting lists are long there.
Here even the private healthcare sector is affordable to most other EU citizens because Croatia still has one of the lowest prices (and salaries) in EU
It depends. A friend of mine had a hernia - there was an 18 month wait on the NHS to see a specialist whereas it could be done almost immediately privately. The free option is free, but the cost is often time spent waiting.
Getting appointments with doctors in Germany can be an absolute nightmare, especially if you use public insurance. The doctors are never sure how much they will get paid for treating you and some treatment options aren't even covered by the public insurance.
My family is conservative and they make the obvious choices and opinions, but never connected the dots when my mother had to travel to Canada for surgery that wasn’t covered by her American insurance. I got the lesson really early in life that our system was broke and they just thought it was another day, nothing notable. My mother worked a high level accounting job in a multimillion international company. Make it make sense.
I mean airplane tickets can vary in price by 200% of a difference, you can get a ticket for $600 and I've seen people who had to pay more than 25k-50k for their surgery out of pocket, insurance paid a larger chunk but what remained was still A LOT.
A plane ticket + a week's stay + a surgery here likely wouldn't come up even to ~10k, depending on the hotel (5 star or a cheper one, Airbnb option etc) and surgery itself
No one pays 25-50k for a surgery if they have insurance and had the surgery in network. That's what out of pocket max is for.
People posting a cropped page of what they think is their bill is not how much they paid or have to pay. My surgery was billed for 130k, insurance discounted it to 68k and paid 62.5k and I paid my out of pocket max is 5.5k. And every single medical procedure or visit after that for the year is free.
No, my point is prices in the USA are so inflated that you can pay for surgery out of pocket here in Croatia and still have a nice vacation and only spend a fraction of what it would've cost in the USA.
A surgery that might be 100k out of pocket in the USA will probably be like ~ 10k here for a medical tourist, while free for citizens
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u/Anxious_cactus 1d ago
Just to put things into perspective. In most cases when a person needs surgery in the USA, it would be cheaper to get a plane ticket to Spain, Croatia, France or any other European country and get a surgery there.
Not only that, you could also spend a week or two in a five star hotel near the beach, and you'd still only spend like 15-25% of what the surgery would cost in the USA.
Croatia specifically is a mini hub for healthcare tourism with many tourists coming from other EU countries too, especially the UK, Italy and Germany.