Americans heading for Cancun are not "vacation refugees" either.
Its the same article no matter which country people are traveling to. The fact that it is about Mexico or Latin America at all enables political comparisons for perspective.
Its an irony or tragedy when people can't get care in their host country with stronger infrastructure in other places.
Precisely. Which is why I found the article's repeated attempts to conflate refugees and tourists to be so transparently disingenuous. Those political comparisons are completely orthogonal.
It has been more than a little educational to ride the F5 key and watch the karma on my original post bounce like a pogo stick!
I think there is some utility to these comparisons, as they are orthogonal, the hyperbole drives the point home.
Except that that isn't really it. It's that it's more subsidized in one place than the other. If it's $200 here and $100 there, and it's exactly the same thing, who doesn't want to save $100? That's true even for people who can afford the price here.
Probably what Mexico should be doing is charging separate prices to foreign nationals.
They can and do charge more but competition drives prices down.
One is they have some kind of government funding or other subsidies for healthcare providers there, in which case they should look for a way to direct their funding to their own population and not rich foreigners looking for lower prices.
The other is that the regulatory environment in the US creates unnecessary costs that don't exist in Mexico and people are naturally taking advantage of the lower overhead. That actually seems pretty plausible given what the regulations look like in the US. But in that case Mexico doesn't need to do anything and everyone who can should try to get their healthcare in Mexico, until such time as the US providers lose so much business that they actually lobby for something to be done about the wasteful regulatory overhead in the US which is making them uncompetitive.