Medical Tourists: Who Goes and What Motivates Them?

Abstract

This study relates consumers' attitudes toward medical tourism to a number of consumer characteristics, such as age, education, income, and insurance status. Principal components analysis of the attitudes of 289 consumers from various communities of North Carolina resulted in three attitude-related factors: economic, treatment-related, and travel-related. Major findings include: (a) the uninsured and low-income consumers are more sensitive to economic factors than the insured and the middle-income consumers; (b) the 51- to 64-year-olds are less motivated by economic factors than young adults; (c) surprisingly, the better one's health, the more one is motivated by treatment-related factors.

KEYWORDS:

• medical tourism
• medical travel
• motivations
• demographics
• uninsured

Notes

Note. For health insurance, the total and percentage figures do not sum to 289 and 100.0 because several respondents reported having more than one type of insurance.

Note. Principal-component loadings after VARIMAX rotation. Only loadings more than 0.6 are included. Eigenvalues are from unrotated solutions.

Note. The baselines for the independent variables are in parentheses. 5 = “extremely important”; 1 = “extremely unimportant.”.