They went because 47 million Americans lack insurance and can’t pay for surgery to fix a bad back or clogged arteries. And they went not for the postsurgical tanning but for the savings: up to 90% off the going rates in the United States. As many as half a million Americans streamed abroad last year in search of affordable alternatives for hip replacements or prostate surgery. That image doesn’t jibe with the numbers today. The phrase “medical tourism” was once used to describe early retirees jetting in to Bangkok or Bangalore to have a little work done before recuperating on the beach. ![]() We can’t afford to pay $1,200 for insurance every month.’ “ “The independent businessman, the doctor, the lawyer. “It’s the high-school-cafeteria person,” Toral says. Overseas patients have more than doubled on his watch, to 430,000 in 2006, generating the majority of the privately owned hospital’s revenue. He’s still amazed, seven years later, that folks who have never set foot on a plane, let alone owned a passport, will log a 24-hour flight - in coach! - to put themselves in the care of a hospital whose name they can’t even pronounce. Toral himself just happens to be a dead ringer for George Clooney, and he tells his story in similarly seductive tones. “Now we’re an international hospital that just happens to be in Thailand.” Before he arrived in 2001 as Bumrungrad’s marketing director, “we were a Thai hospital serving a Thai community,” he says. ![]() Toral is responsible for luring that cosmopolitan clientele here, thousands of miles from home, for a knee replacement or a triple bypass or even just a checkup.
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