The term, “medical tourism” traditionally conjures up images of people traveling to Mexico, Costa Rica or India to save big money on medical procedures. Recent trends in the U.S. medical landscape have made St. George, Utah a destination for high quality health care, at considerable savings for those willing to pay cash for a surgery.
High-deductible health plans often mean the entire cost of a medical procedure comes out-of-pocket. That leaves patients looking for ways to shop around.
“Well you know one hundred years ago, medical care was not a high-profit business. The insurance system got involved, and at first it seemed like a great idea for everyone to pay a little bit of money just in case something terrible were to happen and you were to have very high health care costs,” said Randy Cox, pricinghealthcare.com founder and CEO. “Health care insurance started to cover everything and as the population started using it more and the insurance system realized different ways to make profit, the entire system grew and grew and grew. It’s been growing more complex and as you know more complex systems always tend to be more expensive.”
One of the more recent trends that we’ve seen in medical insurance is the emergence of health savings accounts and high-deductible plans.
“Yeah the cost is going up so steadily and nothing has seemed to slow down the ascent, so the idea is if you put more paying in the pockets of the patients that maybe they’ll shop around. Maybe they’ll think twice about getting a surgery that they don’t need, or going to the doctor if they don’t need to," Cox said. "Unfortunately, making patients pay for more is not bringing prices down because they don’t know what anything costs to begin with."
That could bring about the need for a website such as his.
“Pricinghealthcare.com is an open marketplace for direct pay health care. So we actually encourage health care facilities across the country to put together cash prices, bundling the facilities fees, the physician’s fees, and the anesthesiologist’s fees all into one," Cox said. "We then market that and bring patients and employers to the site so they can shop around, if they pay cash. What that does is creates this downward pressure on prices. It also means that the insurance is taken out of the equation so patients who already have a $10,000 or $20,000 deductible for their family, if they have to pay $2,000 cash for a procedure versus five or seven, it’s worth it for them to pay cash and they save a ton of money."
Among the health care providers listed on the site is the St. George Surgical Center, where Dr. Jerry Hadlock is a partner and an anesthesiologist.
“We saw a large need there, a need that we felt like we could definitely help fill and that the health care consumers would appreciate. You know, it’s been a lot of hard work, it’s been a year-and-a-half in the making and we’re kind of right at the cuff of really great things. It’s been so fun to get calls from Canada, I talked to a guy from New Jersey just last week," Hadlock said. "We’re seeing droves of patients from California that are willing to drive over 14 hours. It’s a great place to come vacation, so we felt like if we can combine that with an extreme value for surgery that people would definitely come. You know, for most people they’ve heard of St. George, they’ve heard of Zion National Park, they’ve heard of the Grand Canyon, they’ve heard of Las Vegas, and we’re just kind of nestled right in-between of all of those. For us we approached it with a lot of optimism, knowing that we’d be successful and we’re seeing that success now.
Dr. Hadlock also maintains that his center has a better than 99 percent satisfaction rating among its patients, and rates of infections are far below the hospital averages.