Dental Departures in the News

“As you’re seeing inflation at the pump, at the grocery store, you’re also seeing it at the hospital. The price of medicine and dental care has gone up and we’ve been a benefactor of that,” Paul McTaggart, CEO and founder of medical travel agency Medical Departures, told CNBC.

In Mexico, American travelers can save anywhere from 60% to 80% on popular dental procedures. For example, the average cost of dental implants in Mexico is $1,190 per tooth, compared with $3,822 in the States, according to Medical Departures, a medical tourism agency and comparison website.

[Interview with] Paul McTaggart. CEO of Dental Departures (Seattle): “A dangerous trend in dentistry today is the high and rising costs of dental care, forcing millions of patients worldwide to forgo treatment, thereby compromising their overall health and creating larger, costlier conditions down the road.”

Medical Departures...has booked 130,000 trips in the past 10 years.

Medical Departures, which helps Americans plan medical tourism trips, sends more than 100,000 people to Mexico for procedures each year.

Nearly 780,000 people were projected to leave the U.S. for health care in 2022, according to data from the medical travel website Medical Departures.

HealthCare.com reviewed 2022 figures provided by leading platform Medical Departures, an Expedia for medical travel...263,000 Americans are expected to seek medical treatments overseas in 2022, up from 115,000 in the pandemic year 2020.

Dental Departures...has booked more than 130,000 patients in some 40 destinations worldwide, making the organization the largest online dental travel agency.

According to Dental Departures, the average price for a root canal, build-up, and crown is $2,094 in the United States. For Americans looking to trim the total cost of dental work, traveling abroad may be the best option.

Analysis by US health insurer, HealthCare.com shows that for most Americans, medical travel means heading south of the border to Mexico, for dental treatment.

...proprietary data from Medical Departures, an “Expedia for medical travel,” found...in 2020 an estimated 290,000 Americans went abroad for dental and medical procedures. The previous year, some 780,000 sought outbound services. Projected analysis for 2021 is 650,000

...Americans are willing to travel to Asia, mainly Thailand and the Philippines, for other medical services. Bangkok is their favourite destination for cosmetic procedures such as botox/fillers, breast augmentation, hair transplants and rhinoplasty.

Medical travel has largely rebounded to pre-pandemic levels while spending has increased 20% to 50%. Americans are traveling abroad to save anywhere from 50% to 80% on medical and dental procedures. In Mexico, root canals are 80% cheaper and in vitro fertilization 75.5%.

Since winter, Medical Departures has enjoyed a large-scale recovery. “U.S. traffic of patients at this point is roughly the same as it was before the pandemic,” says Pope. “And in dollar terms it’s actually up by 20% to 50%, depending on who you ask. It’s people who’ve deferred larger treatments.”

As many as one million Americans travel abroad for medical services each year, and some experts say the annual rate of growth is as much as 20%.