An excellent article in Time Magazine with plenty of interesting numbers. Some examples:

An operation on a herniated disk which would have cost $90,000 in the US was performed at the Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok for less than $10,000.

The number of American patients at the Bumrungrad climbed last year to 55,000. 83% of them came for noncosmetic treatments.

United Group Programs (UGP) of Boca Raton, Fla., a third-party administrator that sells a low-premium coverage plan to 100,000 people, this month began promoting Bumrungrad Hospital as a preferred provider to its customers.

Would people actually travel 10,000 miles for medical care just to make a few bucks? You bet. Polls commissioned by Milstein suggest that few consumers would opt for surgery abroad for incentives below $1,000. But raise the ante above $1,000, and the equation changes. Among people who have sick family members, about 45% of the underinsured or uninsured declare they would get on the plane; even 19% of those who have insurance say they’re game. Above $5,000, the percentage of takers climbs to 61% and 40%, respectively.

Trehan plans to launch next year, in partnership with GE, the first installment of a vast, $250 million specialty Escorts hospital complex near New Delhi that will feature luxury suites, a hotel and swank restaurants for patients and their families. “We will be the Mayo Clinic of the East,” he says. Max Healthcare is also planning a specialty complex in New Delhi (fields: neurologic, orthopedic, ob-gyn and pediatric).

Some more numbers about agencies:

Eight have popped up in Canada, where national health care can mean a yearlong wait for elective surgery. In the U.S. several firms are aiming at the roughly 61 million people who are uninsured or underinsured. PlanetHospital’s founder, “Rudy” Rupak Acharya, says his agency, which in the past seven months has sent some 200 patients abroad, got 11,000 inquiries in March alone. He has just retained Mercer to help him develop an insurance plan for the uninsured that will combine primary and emergency care in the U.S. with surgery abroad.

The article also has a price comparison for procedures like anginoplasty, gastric bypass, heart bypass, heart-valve replacement, hip replacement, hysterectomy and knee replacement in the US, India, Thailand and Singapore.