Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, Maine is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region. He has a terrific article in the Bangor Daily news, headlined, “Consider medical tourism a warning.” in which he discusses the recent news that Hannaford Bros., a supermarket chain with 27,000 employees, is offering a medical travel option as part of employee benefits. The story, initially reported out of Maine, was picked up by the Associated Press and made national news. (Link here.)

Says Dr. Steele:

“Rather than curse Hannaford for its self-interested decision, we would do well to see Hannaford as a corporate canary chirping frantically about the deteriorating conditions brought on by high health care costs in the coal mine of American business. Its action is a warning of things to come. If unheeded, it will not be Hannaford’s action that has brought about the ruin of some hospitals, but the failure of health care and other leaders in this country to listen to the canary.”

Steele asserts that “Surgery, after all, is where hospitals make their money, and the loss of even relatively small numbers of insured surgical patients would be ruinous to many American hospitals.”

So what does everyone else think? Is the rise of medical tourism “a warning” to hospitals and leaders in the U.S.? Or is it a gun held to the head, which is a more drastic view …

Or — as I’ve argued for a few years now — is it ultimately part of the solution to rising healthcare costs?