In 2018, I wrote an article called “Medicare, Medicaid, and Mexico: A Transnational Health Insurance Plan” I described a United States-sponsored, globalized health insurance framework that would reward interconnectedness and collaboration. While no one could predict a global pandemic, the need for transnational health insurance has never been more apparent.

What is Transnational Health Insurance?

While COVID-19 has dramatically altered the medical tourism market, the pandemic has also revealed the unsustainable strain put on domestic healthcare providers. Transnational health insurance offers a regulatory framework for medical tourism. Here, medical tourism describes the process of receiving healthcare services abroad, rather than domestically. Due to previous trade commitments, the United States precludes comprehensive health insurance portability. Transnational health insurance offers its customers coverage for pursuing treatment and medicine abroad.

As our world becomes more globalized, there is a strong need for our healthcare systems to follow suit. Coordination, collaboration, and cooperation are all necessary to combat global health crises. While it is impossible to say that transnational health insurance could have stopped the pandemic, there is no doubt the collection and distribution of information between countries would have cultivated greater pragmatism with regards to prevention and preparation.

Scientists have speculated that COVID-19 is not the last of many pandemics that society will face. By encouraging citizens to place trust in global health markets, the United States can pave the way in developing global health security.

Gains from Trade

Economically, transnational health insurance would relieve a huge burden on the typical American consumer of healthcare. For some, it is cheaper to fly to Egypt to fix a toothache than it is to get it checked on in the United States. This stems the United States isolating its healthcare market from competition which artificially keeps prices high. By opening affordable global health care options for American citizens, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals in the United States will be forced to lower prices to compete with global markets.

For the United States, skepticism over foreign medical treatment and complex international trade agreements stagnated industry growth. Transnational insurance solves these issues by creating public trust since all healthcare facilities covered by insurance would need to be vetted and held to higher safety standards. Additionally, transnational health insurance would permit trade liberalization without violating the United States’ trade commitment under the General Agreement on Trade in Services which is currently deterring private investment. This allows the government to encourage a race to the top for quality. Once the market stabilizes in price, high-quality care will determine where Americans get their healthcare. Without a monopoly on treatment, United States hospitals will need to find new ways to incentivize patient intake.

Diplomacy

In times of geopolitical turmoil, scientific diplomacy through health collaboration provides a meaningful way to connect the global community. By developing threads of commonality between citizens of the world, geopolitical crises of all sorts can be mitigated. The insurance and healthcare industry implicates huge aspects of the global economy. By instituting global health norms through regulation and insurance standards, transnational health insurance motivates cooperation on all sorts of topics; countries who would otherwise have unrelated domestic goals, could unite under a common cause for global health by standardizing their healthcare industry to compete for patients from the United States. Ultimately, other countries could adopt similar portability standards which would further strengthen interconnectedness.

Conclusion

Transnational health insurance offers a novel solution to increasing healthcare costs and crises. The capacity of the global community to respond to problems of all sorts give physicians, scientists, and policymakers a mechanism to make our world more interconnected. By developing a global health community, the United States can cultivate a position of leadership in approaching future pandemics.