a country · United States of AmericaUnited States

The largest source market in the world and a major destination in the same breath. Americans leave for dentistry, weight-loss surgery, cosmetic surgery and fertility treatment, mostly southward and mostly by road or a short flight. Patients arrive from Canada, the Gulf, Latin America and beyond for the complex end — oncology, transplant, cell therapy — that few systems can staff. The federal entitlement most travellers assume they carry with them does not leave the country.

Start with what is not covered. Medicare's own page states it plainly: "Medicare usually doesn't cover health care while you're traveling outside the U.S. but there are some exceptions". The exceptions are narrow and geographic, not clinical — a foreign hospital nearer than the nearest US one that can treat the condition; a medical emergency while crossing Canada by the most direct route between Alaska and another state; shipboard care when the ship is in a US port or within six hours of one. None of them covers an operation somebody flew abroad to have. A planned knee replacement in Mexico or a dental course in Costa Rica is paid by the patient, in full, and that single rule shapes who travels from here: people without cover, people whose cover excludes the thing they need, and people facing a deductible larger than a fare.

On the other side of the ledger the CDC's chapter says "Surveillance data indicate that millions of U.S. residents travel internationally for medical care each year" and names the destinations US patients most commonly travel to: Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, and several countries in South America. Inference — the direction of that sentence is solid and the magnitude is not. Millions is a wide word, the surveillance it rests on counts border crossings and survey answers rather than operations, and this directory carries the destination list and leaves the number where it found it.

Inbound is thinner still in public data. Large American cancer centres run international offices — MD Anderson in Houston states that "Hundreds of patients come to Houston from other countries every year" and staffs certified interpreters in Arabic, French, Mandarin, Spanish, Vietnamese and American Sign Language — but hundreds is the number the hospital chose to publish, and no federal series counts foreign patients admitted to US hospitals.

The United States is also the only location in the ISAPS 2024 survey that returned N/A for the share of patients attending from other locations, in a survey where it reported more aesthetic procedures than anywhere else: 6,165,173, of which 4,165,645 were non-surgical.

The domestic price is the mechanism. American hospitals bill from chargemasters, negotiate different rates with every insurer, and are required by federal rule to publish machine-readable price files that are hard to read and harder to compare; a patient without insurance is quoted from the top of that structure. Trade practice — the outbound trade runs on that gap: employers and unions have at times contracted directly with foreign or domestic centres of excellence for joint replacement and cardiac work, and border clinics quote a single cash number against an American bill nobody can predict. Inbound, a foreign ministry or an embassy is often the payer, and the hospital's international office quotes an estimate and takes a deposit before the visa letter is written.

As of 16 September 2026 the Medicare position is unchanged and is carried here as a rule record. Nothing on this page says whether travelling is worth it: the comparison that would settle it — the US price a given patient would actually pay, against the foreign price plus the flight, the escort, the extra nights and the revision at home — is not a number either side publishes.