The American health care industry, as this book argues, is globalizing. Whether because of exports such as medical tourists, imports such as professionals, or complex commodity chains in areas such as research and development, the health care sectors of the United States and other advanced industrial countries are increasingly enmeshed in the kinds of global regulatory and production systems that we find in other industries. Not surprisingly, the equally substantial American legal and bioethics industries are rising to the challenges that come from the globalization of health care, and I. Glenn Cohen's edited volume is a landmark in their efforts to grapple with the various problems and possibilities.
The book's organization identifies medical tourism (traveling for medical services, subdivided into travel for services available at home and services illegal at home), workforce migration, the globalization of health care research and development (e.g., trials and patent issues), and telemedicine as major...
