More and more Americans turning to medical tourism for healthcare needs

• Always lift from your knees, and never sprint a mile through the Atlanta airport with 75 pounds of luggage heaped on your right shoulder.
• Ever since, I have lived in constant pain, a pain that radiates from my right shoulder and surges down the length of my spine.
• For almost 10 years, millions of people have traveled great distances for health care, primarily because they cannot afford the same treatment at home.
• They go for procedures both urgent and elective, from liposuction to heart surgery, lid lifts to total knee replacements.
• Last year, the medical-tourism business grossed around $40 billion, and the numbers are getting bigger every day.
• A recent McKinsey study predicts that medical tourism in India, worth $333 million last year, will bring in $2.3 billion by 2012.
• Heart-bypass surgery runs $60,000 to $150,000 in this country.
• Other less-serious procedures---tummy tucks, face lifts, breast implants, LASIK eye surgery, even MRIs and dental work---can also be had at a fraction of they cost here.
• Using Thailand's success as a model, countries like India, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines have established governmental committees to promote medical tourism.
• I am not among the 45.8 million Americans with no health insurance, but I do fall into another broad category, the inadequately insured.
• Then, like Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Donald Rumsfeld, I learned to type standing up, and finally, disastrously, to dictate.
• Whenever a paycheck arrived, I supplemented this rigorous routine with massage, acupuncture, and cortisone injections.
• The results of my MRI, however---the MRI I spent two months hassling my insurance company to approve---disrupted this dream sequence.
• To my dismay, my doctor warned they would be tricky to correct surgically, at least not without considerable risk to my spinal column.