Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics

by I. Glenn Cohen

Overview

Can your employer require you to travel to India for a hip replacement as a condition of insurance coverage? If injury results, can you sue the doctor, hospital or insurer for medical malpractice in the country where you live? Can a country prohibit its citizens from helping a relative travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide? What about travel for abortion? In Patients with Passports, I. Glenn Cohen tackles these important questions, and provides the first comprehensive legal and ethical analysis of medical tourism. Medical tourism is a growing multi-billion dollar industry involving millions of patients who travel abroad each year to get health care. Some seek legitimate services like hip replacements and travel to avoid queues, save money, or because their insurer has given them an incentive to do so. Others seek to circumvent prohibitions on accessing services at home and go abroad to receive abortions, assisted suicide, commercial surrogacy, or experimental stem cell treatments. In this book, author I. Glenn Cohen focuses on patients traveling for cardiac bypass and other legal services to places like India, Thailand, and Mexico, and analyzes issues of quality of care, disease transmission, liability, private and public health insurance, and the effects of this trade on foreign health care systems. He goes on to examine medical tourism for services illegal in the patient's home country, such as organ purchase, abortion, assisted suicide, fertility services, and experimental stem cell treatments. Here, Cohen examines issues such as extraterritorial criminalization, exploitation, immigration, and the protection of children. Through compelling narratives, expert data, and industry explanations Patients with Passports enables the reader to connect with the most prevalent legal and ethical issues facing medical tourism today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190218195
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

I. Glenn Cohen is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. He is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (or medical ethics), and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. Prior to becoming a professor, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and as a lawyer for U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Staff, where he handled litigation in the Courts of Appeals and in the U.S. Supreme Court. He was selected as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2012-2013) and by the Greenwall Foundation to receive a Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics. He also leads the Ethics and Law initiative as part of the multi-million dollar NIH funded Harvard Catalyst for The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center program. Professor Cohen is the author of more than 60 articles and chapters, and his award-winning work has appeared in leading legal law review journals including: Stanford, Cornell, and Southern California; medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA; bioethics journals including the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report; and for public health, the American Journal of Public Health. He is the editor of The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Table of Contents

Preface Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Medical Tourism Industry Part I: Medical Tourism for Services Legal in the Patient's Home Country Chapter 2: Quality and Information Chapter 3: Legal Liability Chapter 4: Medical Tourism Through Private Health Insurance Chapter 5: Medical Tourism Through Public Health Insurance: The EU Model and Beyond Chapter 6: Medical Tourism's Effects on the Destination Country: An Empirical and Ethical Examination. Part II: Medical Tourism for Services Illegal in the Patient's Home Country Chapter 7: Transplant Tourism Chapter 8: Medical Tourism and Ending Life: Travel for Assisted Suicide and Abortion Chapter 9: Medical Tourism and the Creation of Life: A Study of Fertility Tourism Chapter 10: Medical Tourism for Experimental Therapies: An In-Depth Exploration of Stem Cell Therapy Tourism. Index

Editorial Reviews

"A definitive examination of exceptionally thorny issues on the horizon, or already here."
-Harvard Magazine

"This timely book will prove helpful to policymakers, legal scholars, and patients around the world seeking to understand the social and legal implications of the growing medical tourism industry."
-Harvard Law Review

From the Publisher