Need Surgery? You Better Travel

Thursday, February 11, 2016
6:00pm — 7:30pm
Hungarian Mission to the UN
227 East 52nd Street
New York, NY
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Where do people go for medical tourism and why?

6 p.m. | Reception with wine and hors d’oeuvres
6:30 p.m. | Presentation
7:15 p.m. | Book Signing

Join BookTalkUNA for an evening with Sasha Issenberg, Bloomberg Politics contributor and author of the latest book Outpatients: The Astonishing New World of Medical Tourism, as he traveled to Hungary to understand how a small country builds a medical tourism business from scratch and markets it to the world.

"A small, sharp new book ... It reads like a magazine article—fast, entertaining and occasionally funny." —The Washington Post

"Revealing and timely new book ... A notable strength of this book is Issenberg's keen and thorough shoe-leather reporting as he brings us through the hospitals of Eastern Europe" —The New Republic

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.

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). He is currently a resident scholar in the UCLA Department of Political Science.

UNA Members: FREE
UNA Student Members: FREE
Guests and Non-Members: $15

http://www.unanyc.org/events/2016/20160211_booktalk_issenberg.html

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