Ime i prezime Business English for Tourism 2013 06-01-2014 Reaction paper : Central Europe Becoming a big destination

for medical tourism

Article Central Europe Becoming a big destination for medical Tourism was published in October 2013 in respectable magazine Forbes. Author is Luiza Oleszczuk, polish journalist that covers themes such as business, culture and politics of eastern and central Europe. Main theme of the article I chose is health tourism that is becoming specialy important for Americans. It is well known that 1,6 billion of American citizens don't have medical insurrance and they traditionally travel in countries like Mexico, Costa Rica, Thailand, Brazil or even India to do some procedures or to fix their theets. But latley, huge number of Americans and Canadinas has recognized central Europe as rising star in medical tourism. New members of Europian Union are good example of good services, educated doctors and reasonable price for all those operations or surgeries that are very expensive in United States. In my opinion, author has find a good way to show some real numbers and statistics that are showing that health tourism is much more than just taking care about your health. I think that for Americans it is a cheaper way to improve their lifes and for countries like Spain, Chech, Hungary or Poland it is another way to get more tourist. The reader can conclude that one of the best in that new industry is Poland because, as you can see in article, their goverment is very good at offering helpful support in promotion and logistic. They also have a group of private and govermental organisations that are working really hard to get more patients from Scandinavia, United Kingdom, Germany or United States. At first, the author was not succsessful at making me belive that it have some sense and that it is cheaper to come from another continent to central Europe to get new dental implants or another medical service ( even cancer treatment) but, as reader can conclude trough the reading, situation is complicated for Americans without medical innsurrance and in Canada waiting lists are so long that even those with regular insurrance can not wait when they need something quickly. The author seems to find good connection between those reasons and traveling abroad. In the and, we can all agree that central Europe offers more than just good doctors and clinics. For Americans and Canadians it is also a culture that they can relate to and people mostly speak english really fluently. On other side, Europe is attractive destination for all tourist and

lot of Europe capital cities are real museums and have enormouse heritage and history. At the end, it' s closer than Asia or India. I think that very important fact is that european doctors are well educated and I did not like that author didn't mentioned that in article. But natural beautys are indispensable. You can see that in Hungary there are over 1500 thermal springs. Some of them already have supporting infrastructure and I hope that trend will continue. That is one of the ways to get tourist through whole year and to make them stay few days longer. For now, we still don't have excact dates about number of health tourist or incomes that contries like Poland have from them and it for sure is one of big chances for central Europe to become even bigger and better destination for medical tourism.