Japan plans to market medical services to wealthy tourists for income to help the country cope with rising cost of its aging society.
The nation should target rich visitors from Asia and the Russian Far East to turn its health-care industry “from a cost center to a profitable one,” the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a report compiled this month that was seen by Bloomberg News.
Japan plans to start the project in September with 10 of the nation’s biggest hospitals, including the National Cancer Center and Keio University Hospital in Tokyo, while travel and translation companies will help coordinate tour packages, the report said. The nation will offer “value-added services” that aren’t widely available, such as gene diagnosis and regenerative therapies to restore lost or damaged cells and tissues, it said.
“Medical services are important as an industry,” Toshiaki Shibata, a researcher at Mitsubishi Research Institute in Tokyo, said by phone on July 23. “In terms of employment, regional medical institutions have a broad base and involving related businesses may help increase national income.”
The ministry proposal includes package tours combining medical checkups with sightseeing at cultural, historical and sports venues.
About 28 million people in Japan, or 22 percent of the population, were aged 65 years or older last year, a 10 percentage point increase from 1990, data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications show.
Covering Costs
Promoting Japan’s medical industry may help make hospitals less dependent on patients’ payments to cover their costs, said Takashi Abe, a researcher at NLI Research Institute Ltd., a unit of Nippon Life Insurance Co., the nation’s largest life insurer.
“We hope this project can help improve hospital management and develop our health-care-related industry,” Koji Fujimoto, director of the ministry’s service industries division, said from his office in Tokyo on July 21.
The ministry will carry out the project for one to two years and get feedback on the feasibility of medical tourism for the longer term, Fujimoto said. He didn’t provide more details on steps the ministry will implement to attract travelers.
The high costs of treatment in Japan may deter travelers, Mitsubishi Research’s Shibata said.
“Price-bargaining ability is necessary to advance medical tourism in Japan as commodity prices are high here,” Shibata said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be so optimistic about the outlook for this industry.”
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