Join us for an evening of discussion with special guest
SASHA ISSENBERG
Author and diplomat
6 p.m. | Reception
6:30 p.m. | Presentation
7:15 p.m. | Book Signing
Hungarian Mission to the UN
227 East 52nd Street
New York, NY
ADMISSION
UNA Members: FREE
UNA Student Members: FREE
Non-Members: $15
Is medical tourism the future of health care? Sasha Issenberg travels to Hungary to understand how a small country builds a medical tourism business from scratch and markets it to the world.
The story of how Hungary became Europe's dental chair is a case study in the booming practice of medical tourism. We can witness more people travel to Hungary each year for dental care than to any other country in Europe. The towns of Mosonmagyaróvár and Sopron boast the highest concentrations of dental clinics in the world—about one for every 200 residents.
In an increasingly globalized world, national governments may be losing control over the flows of money and information, but they still have responsibility for health care. Still, traveling abroad for medical care, once the province of the wealthy or desperate, is becoming commonplace as patients go in search of lower prices, and some countries have found economic opportunity in turning health care into a global business. An American with insurance can expect to pay $90,000 for a heart bypass in the U.S., but only $12,000 if he or she travels to Thailand. Emiratis are heading to South Korea for organ transplants, Canadians to Costa Rica for checkups, and Libyans to Bulgaria for knee surgery.
Reporting from Eastern Europe, Sasha Issenberg tells the story of the region's embrace of medical tourism, and thinks about whether the phenomenon is destabilizing one of the last remaining pillars of the traditional welfare state.
We hope you'll join us for what promises to be a fascinating evening with Mr. Issenberg.
Review: Need Surgery, Will Travel
Guest Speaker
SASHA ISSENBERG
Sasha Issenberg is the Washington correspondent for Monocle and a contributor to Bloomberg Politics. He covered the 2008 election as a national political correspondent for The Boston Globe and the 2012 election as a columnist for Slate. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, New York, The New York Times Magazine and George, where he was a contributing editor. In addition to Outpatients, his books include The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (2012) and The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy (2007). Mr. Issenberg is currently a resident scholar in the UCLA Department of Political Science.
Photo: David Fields
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