Does '65% of Medical Tourists Finance Their Trip'? What the Actual Data Shows

The pitch for medical tourism almost always leads with a number: save 40 to 80 percent on the same procedure, pocket the difference, fly home with a tan. Buried underneath that pitch is a second, much less discussed number — how many of those patients are actually paying with savings at all, versus a loan, a credit card, or a payment plan they'll still be servicing long after the stitches come out.

A specific statistic shows up constantly in articles about paying for medical tourism: that 65 percent of medical tourists use "some form of financing" to fund their trip abroad, usually attributed to the Medical Tourism Association. We went looking for where that number actually comes from — a survey, a report, an underlying dataset — and could not find one. It's worth explaining why before getting to the numbers we could verify, because the search itself says something about how thin the data on this question really is.

The untraceable "65%"

The claim circulates across dozens of medical-tourism financing blogs and clinic marketing pages, nearly always in the same sentence structure and nearly always without a link to a source document.¹ We checked the specific pages search engines most often cite for it. None contained the figure when read directly — one didn't mention financing statistics at all, another discussed financing options without citing any adoption rate, and a third referenced an unrelated statistic (a National Bankruptcy Forum finding that a $500 unexpected bill is unaffordable for 45% of Americans) that has nothing to do with medical tourism financing specifically.¹ We also searched the Medical Tourism Association's own published material and could not locate a survey or report stating this figure. The 2024 MTA/International Healthcare Research Center patient survey that does exist asks about trust, accreditation, and payment concerns — 57.7% of respondents said international payments worried them — but does not report what share of patients ultimately financed their trip.²

None of this means financing is rare in medical tourism — the rest of this article shows the opposite. It means one of the most-repeated statistics about it appears to be an artifact that spread across SEO content without ever being traceable to a primary source, which is exactly the kind of number a reader should be skeptical of on sight.

What financing surgery abroad actually looks like

Set the unverifiable stat aside, and there's a genuine, well-documented financing industry built specifically around medical tourism and medical debt more broadly. The products differ enormously in cost:

The spread is the story. A patient using a credit-union-style product at 5.9% and a patient using a deferred-interest medical credit card at 32.99% are both, technically, "financing" their trip — but one is a manageable installment loan and the other is one missed deadline away from owing thousands more than the procedure itself cost.

The deferred-interest trap, in the government's own numbers

CareCredit is by far the largest player in this space, and its structure is the one worth understanding in detail, because it's frequently marketed to medical-tourism patients directly through clinic and facilitator websites. It has grown from about 4.4 million cardholders and 177,000 participating providers in 2013 to roughly 12 million cardholders and 270,000 providers in 2024, according to a 2014 Government Accountability Office investigation and 2025 reporting on the same product line.⁷⁸ Synchrony Bank's Health & Wellness division — which issues CareCredit — reported $956 million in interest and fee income in the third quarter of 2024 alone, a 13% year-over-year increase.⁸

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's May 2023 report on medical credit cards and financing plans found that $23 billion in health care expenses were charged to deferred-interest medical credit cards and installment loans between 2018 and 2020, generating roughly $1 billion in deferred interest charges paid by patients — money owed specifically because a balance wasn't paid off before the promotional deadline.⁹ Transaction sizes on these products ranged from $35 to $40,000, and the CFPB noted APRs on the credit-card products reaching 26.99% or higher, with installment loan products more commonly around 16%.⁹

That one-third figure is corroborated from two separate directions. The CFPB's own analysis put the share of purchases by sub-619-credit-score borrowers that accrued deferred interest at roughly 34%.⁹ Separately, reporting based on Synchrony's own disclosures found that about 80% of CareCredit cardholders overall pay off their balance before the promotional period ends — meaning roughly 20% do not and are charged interest retroactively, a figure that climbs further among the lowest-credit-score borrowers specifically.⁸ Two independent looks at the same underlying behavior — a federal regulator's data analysis and the lender's own disclosed repayment rate — land on a consistent story: a meaningful minority of patients using this product, concentrated among people with weaker credit, end up paying substantially more than the "0% interest" marketing implied.

CareCredit's current terms sheet states a 32.99% purchase APR and a 39.99% penalty APR for missed payments — both higher than the GAO's 2014 finding of "26.99% or more" for the most commonly used products at the time, indicating rates have risen over the past decade rather than fallen as the product has scaled.⁷⁶ In August 2024, a proposed class action was filed against Synchrony Bank in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, arguing that CareCredit's interest rates violate New York's usury law, which caps interest at 16% and treats anything above 25% as criminally usurious.¹⁰ The case is ongoing and the allegations remain unproven, but the underlying rate figures cited in the complaint match CareCredit's own published terms.

Who's actually going into debt for this

If the "65%" statistic can't be verified, the more useful question is who is taking on debt to pay for health care at all — medical tourism included — and whether that population looks like people who "have to be rich," or the opposite.

Two different KFF analyses, using two different methods, put very different numbers on U.S. medical debt, and the gap is worth explaining rather than picking one. A KFF poll of 2,375 U.S. adults conducted in February–March 2022 found that roughly 100 million adults (41%) carry debt they attribute to medical or dental bills — but that figure counts installment plans owed to hospitals, medical bills carried on ordinary credit cards, and money borrowed from family, not just debt in collections.¹¹ A separate KFF analysis using Census Bureau Survey of Income and Program Participation data — a narrower definition, counting only money owed of more than $250 directly for medical bills — put the total at $195 billion as of 2019, and a 2024 update using the same methodology found about 20 million adults (roughly 1 in 12) owe more than $250, with 3 million owing more than $10,000; that update priced total U.S. medical debt at roughly $220 billion.¹²¹³ The two headline figures (100 million people vs. roughly 20 million) disagree because they're measuring different things — one counts any debt a person attributes to medical costs, however it's structured, while the other counts formally-owed medical debt above a $250 threshold. Both point the same direction: this isn't a niche problem, and it skews toward people with less financial cushion, not more — the narrower KFF analysis found that roughly 1 in 10 adults with household income below 400% of the federal poverty line carry medical debt.¹³

That's the same population that medical tourism is frequently marketed to as a solution. An estimated 27 million Americans were uninsured as of 2024 Census Bureau data, and a 2024 KFF survey found that 75% of uninsured adults skip or delay medical care specifically because of cost.¹⁴ For that population, "financing a trip abroad" isn't an alternative to paying cash — it's often the only path to getting the procedure at all, cash or credit.

When it goes wrong, "afford it" gets expensive fast

The financing numbers above assume the trip goes as planned. Two peer-reviewed studies — a decade apart, at different institutions — looked specifically at what happens when it doesn't, and both found the same pattern: complications from bariatric surgery performed abroad generate large domestic hospital bills, disproportionately for patients without solid insurance coverage.

A 2025 study published in Surgical Endoscopy reviewed 91 patients treated at an academic center near the U.S.–Mexico border for complications of bariatric tourism between January 2014 and December 2024. Average total hospital charges came to $193,445 per patient, rising to $424,976 for the costliest complication category (anastomotic or staple-line leaks). Patients and their insurers ultimately paid an average of only about 27 cents of every dollar billed — average actual payments came to $49,649 — and 42.9% of the patients in the study were covered by Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program, which reimburses at lower rates than Medicare or private insurance.¹⁵ A Medi-Cal share that high is a strong indicator that a large share of the patients presenting with these complications are lower-income, not the "can afford anything" population the affordability myth implies.

An earlier, smaller study from a different university hospital, published as a 2018 conference abstract in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, reviewed 12 patients treated for bariatric-tourism complications between November 2014 and January 2018. Average total hospital charges came to $238,737, and seven of the twelve patients were either uninsured or had their insurance deny coverage for some or all of the complication treatment.¹⁶ The dollar figure is in the same range as the larger 2025 study despite the years and institutions being different, and both studies independently found that a large share of complication patients lacked adequate coverage — that consistency across two unrelated single-center studies is itself a form of corroboration, even though neither study is large enough to generalize a national rate.

What the headline numbers leave out

A few caveats belong here explicitly, because this is a topic where precision is easy to fake and hard to actually deliver:

• There is no reliable, nationally representative figure for what share of medical tourists finance their trip. The "65%" claim doesn't hold up, and we found nothing more rigorous to replace it with. Anyone citing a single, precise percentage for this should be asked where it comes from.
• The complication-cost studies are small and not representative of all medical tourism. Ninety-one patients and twelve patients, respectively, at two U.S. academic centers near the Mexican border, look specifically at bariatric surgery — one of the higher-complication-risk procedure categories in medical tourism. They say nothing directly about, say, dental work or hip replacements, which carry different risk profiles.
• Financing terms vary by lender and credit score more than any single APR figure can capture. The 5.9%–35.99%+ range above is real, but where any individual patient lands in it depends on creditworthiness in ways that aren't disclosed until they apply.
• Domestic insurance often won't cover complications from a procedure performed abroad, per the JACS study above — a cost that's frequently left out of the "how much you'll save" calculation entirely, because it only shows up if something goes wrong.

How to actually use this if you're weighing it

If financing is part of the plan, the single most useful question to ask a lender or clinic facilitator isn't "what's the monthly payment" — it's "what is the total amount I will have paid if I take the full term to pay this off, including any deferred or penalty interest." For deferred-interest products specifically, ask directly whether unpaid interest is waived or applied retroactively to the full original balance if the promotional deadline is missed — that single mechanism, more than the headline rate, is what turns a "0% financing" pitch into a multi-thousand-dollar surprise.

Separately, before booking, it's worth calling your domestic health insurer and asking, in writing, whether they will cover treatment for a complication from a procedure performed outside the country — not a hypothetical, but the specific procedure and destination under consideration. Based on the two studies above, "no" is a common enough answer that assuming coverage is a real financial risk, not a formality.

Footnotes

1. https://www.medicaltourismco.com/how-to-get-medical-loan-for-surgery-abroad/ — Medical Tourism Corporation, "Medical Loans for Surgery Abroad." Accessed Sep 8, 2026. (Fetched directly and found to cite an unrelated National Bankruptcy Forum statistic on $500 emergency-expense affordability, not a medical-tourism financing adoption rate — one of several pages checked that repeat the "65%" claim in search summaries but do not contain it on the page itself.) ↩ ↩²

2. https://www.medicaltourismassociation.com/mta-in-the-news — Medical Tourism Association, coverage of the 2024 MTA/International Healthcare Research Center patient survey. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

3. https://universalmedicaltravel.com/financing/ — Universal Medical Travel, "Medical Tourism Financing – Loans for Medical Procedures," describing its Med Loan Finance lending partnership. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

4. https://www.prosper.com/legal/borrower-apr — Prosper Marketplace, "Borrower APR" disclosure page. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

5. https://withcherry.com/blog/klarna-alternatives — Cherry, "Klarna Alternatives: Better Buy Now, Pay Later Options for Patients and Practices," citing Cherry's, LendingClub's, and Affirm's own published rate ranges. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. https://www.carecredit.com/well-u/financial-health/deferred-interest-vs-apr/ — CareCredit (Synchrony Bank), "Deferred Interest Promotional Financing vs. 0% APR Offers," current account terms. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩ ↩²

7. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-570 — U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Consumer Finance: Credit Cards Designed for Medical Services Not Covered by Insurance" (GAO-14-570, published Jun 2014). Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩ ↩²

8. https://time.com/7206759/medical-credit-cards/ — Time, "How Doctors Are Pushing Medical Credit Cards on Patients," citing Synchrony Bank's own disclosed cardholder, provider, and earnings figures. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/medical-credit-cards-and-financing-plans/ — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "Medical Credit Cards and Financing Plans" (published May 4, 2023). Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

10. https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/carecredit-loans-with-high-interest-rates-offered-at-vulnerable-moments-class-action-claims/ — Top Class Actions, reporting on the proposed class action filed against Synchrony Bank in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York (filed Aug 19, 2024). Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

11. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/diagnosis-debt-investigation-100-million-americans-hidden-medical-debt/ — KFF Health News, "100 Million People in America Are Saddled With Health Care Debt" (published Jun 16, 2022), reporting a KFF poll of 2,375 U.S. adults fielded Feb–Mar 2022. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

12. https://www.kff.org/health-costs/1-in-10-adults-owe-medical-debt-with-millions-owing-more-than-10000/ — KFF, "1 in 10 Adults Owe Medical Debt, With Millions Owing More Than $10,000" (published Mar 10, 2022), analysis of 2020 Survey of Income and Program Participation data on 2019 medical debt. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

13. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-burden-of-medical-debt-in-the-united-states/ — Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, "The Burden of Medical Debt in the United States" (published Feb 12, 2024). Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩ ↩²

14. https://sylkhealth.com/blog/articles/medical-tourism-uninsured-americans — Sylk Health, "Medical Tourism for Uninsured Americans: A Guide (2026)," citing 2024 U.S. Census Bureau uninsured-rate data and a 2024 KFF survey on cost-related care avoidance. Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

15. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12222374/ — Surgical Endoscopy, "Getting more than what you pay for? Managing complications of bariatric tourism at an academic center near the US-Mexico border" (published Jun 2025). Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

16. https://journals.lww.com/10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2018.08.440 — Journal of the American College of Surgeons, "Impact of Bariatric Medical Tourism on US Health Care Utilization: A University Hospital Experience" (published Oct 2018). Accessed Sep 8, 2026. ↩

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