Free Malaysia Today – English

By  N.A. Frances

MEDICAL tourism is expected to bring in more than RM540 million to the Malaysian economy next year.

However, scientists from Universiti Sains Malaysia are saying that the negative impact of this industry has already kicked in and the biggest losers are the Malaysian public.

They claim that Malaysian taxpayers will be subsidising facilities and the cost of training medical practitioners that will end up serving the interests of foreigners coming for treatment in Malaysia.

All this at the expense of low-income locals, said Dr Jayabalan Thambyappa, Mahmoud Al-Haddad, Mohamed Azmi Ahmad Hassali and Asrul Akmal Shafie, who carried out the study and gave FMT a copy of their report, “The Flipside of Medical Tourism.”

The reort says:

• the government hospitals will continue to face shortage of doctors and other medical staff. Specialists and the more experienced medical staff who had benefited from either government scholarships or subsidised medical education at government universities are drawn by the lucrative salaries offered by private hospitals involved in medical tourism;
• the state-of-the-art facilities developed through government subsidies are being used on foreigners who come for treatment at the private hospitals. These facilities do not reach Malaysian patients at government hospitals who need them the most but cannot afford to pay;
• the government will continue to make an extra attempt to ensure the infrastructure within the hospitals and outside such as roads, utilities and airports – all of which are subsidised by taxpayers; and
• the cost of the generation, storage and disposal of medical waste increases proportionately with the number of medical tourists. Each year, the government will have more to bear because medical tourism in Malaysia grows at 30% per year, according to statistics by the Association of Private Hospitals of Malaysia.

The study also disputes the government’s claim that medical tourism results in economic spillover and the creation of jobs. This theory does not hold water, it says.

“The question arises as to who will actually benefit from this spillover and how the creation of jobs would be. For instance, the ownership of facilities such as hospitals and hotels cater to the medical tourists – would they be locally owned or would they have international stakeholders?”

The study also disputes the claim that medical tourism brings in foreign tourist dollars.

“These tourist dollars spent involved expenditure on ‘packages’ developed with the foreign agent which include travel cost (foreign airlines), procedure cost  (devices and peripherals used are imported, so money is actually repatriated}, and recuperation and services for recuperation (devices for rehabilitation are also imported),” says the study.

The Association of Private Hospitals of Malaysia estimates that by next year the Malaysian medical tourism sector will contribute RM540 million by offering medical treatment to about 625,000 medical tourists.

One in five Malaysian hospitals cater to foreign patients, offering them medical procedures and treatments ranging from cardiology to cardiothoracic, dental, cosmetic and general surgery.

Medical tourism in Asia could generate as much as RM15 billion by 2012 with about half of this revenue going to India. In the ASEAN region, some of the hottest medical tourism spots are Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore.