Complementary medicine, medical tourism
contribute to increase in personal health care expenses.
Americans’
out-of-pocket health care costs are rising, but not all of it is due to rising
health insurance co-payments and deductibles. Two new reports indicate that
people liberally spend their own money on non-conventional sources of medical
care.
The
National Center for Health Statistics said an estimated 59.3 million people age
4 or older spent $30.2 billion out-of-pocket in 2012 on complementary and
alternative medicine, or CAM, services.
CAM services are non-conventional medical
treatments like acupuncture, biofeedback, chiropractic manipulation, hypnosis,
massage therapy and diet supplements. Most CAM services are not covered by
health insurance.
Most of
the $30.2 billion was spent on visits to non-conventional practitioners ($14.7
billion) and natural product supplements ($12.8 billion), according to the NCHS
report.
Consumer
spending on CAM services “constitute a substantial part of out-of-pocket health
care costs and are comparable to out-of-pocket costs for conventional physician
services and prescription drugs,” the NCHS said.
New
figures released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services projected
out-of-pocket national health expenditures to reach $350.1 billion this year
and climb nearly 60 percent to $555.8 billion by 2025.
A
separate report from Visa and Oxford Economics said as much as 4 percent of the
world’s population travels internationally for medical treatment, spending an
estimated $439 billion annually on care outside of their home country. The report
said one of the major drivers of growth in the medical tourism business is the
fact that certain treatments and medications are not approved or available in a
patient’s home country.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 750,000 U.S. citizens
travel to another country for care each year.
The top
five countries that medical tourists visit for treatments are Canada, the
United Kingdom, Israel, Singapore and India, according to the Medical Tourism
Index compiled by the Medical Tourism Association.
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