Is demand for medical tourism price-elastic or inelastic? Explain your answer. Medical tourism, whereby patients travel to

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Is demand for medical tourism price-elastic or inelastic? Explain your answer.

Medical tourism, whereby patients travel to a different country for either urgent or elective surgery, is fast becoming a worldwide, multi-billion-dollar industry. Time, money and anonymity are three reasons driving international medical queue-jumping.
The rapid rise in this new industry is attributable to the exorbitant costs of medical care in developed countries, in conjunction with the comparative ease and affordability nowadays of international travel, rapidly improving technology and standards of care worldwide, and the proven safety records of medical care in many developing countries around the world.
Surgery wait times, in particular, can lead patients to seek alternative venues.
North Americans are finding that trips abroad combined with surgery can cost between four and ten times less than medical procedures at home. Also, by mixing surgery with pleasure, less time away from work is required. And, for everyone, foreign travel can disguise the primary purpose of the vacation so that friends and colleagues attribute their newly refreshed, youthful appearance to the benign effects of the holiday rather than the cosmetic surgeon’s scalpel.

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