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A growing number of patients are leaving the United States for medical care. They are traveling to developing countries like India and Thailand for a variety of sophisticated treatments, such as heart surgeries, joint replacements, and fertility treatments. In the process, they are choosing to forego the legal and regulatory protections-and perhaps even insurance coverage-they receive in the United States. Essentially, patients are waiving the rights, benefits, and protections offered by our health care regulatory system to seek medical care in countries that may not grant them remotely similar rights or protections.

" Medical tourism" is the latest response to a familiar trend. Each year, the United States spends more on health care, but insures fewer people. Health care spending is predicted to account for one of every five dollars spent in the United States by 2015, 1 and the United States by itself spends roughly half of the …