Introduction: India has a huge potential for providing world-class medical care at competitive prices combined with attractive resorts for convalescence. Though the country has a poor public health system, due to the growth of excellent state of the art hospitals, India is now a preferred health tourism destination. Social value concerns how scarce resources are allocated and used. It considers more than just the financial transaction. It includes happiness, wellbeing, health, inclusion and empowerment. This appraisal considers the social value of medical tourism as a business undertaking in India. Methodology: This evaluation involves an extensive literature search for various articles on medical tourism with a special focus on South East Asia, India and social value. Social return on investment (SROI) is one method to measure values that are social, economic and environmental and can identify how effectively an organization creates value for the community. Results and discussion: Medical tourism is a business approach where private companies (corporate hospitals etc) make a profit on the escalating costs of health care in the western world and the poor health care facilities available in other countries. To believe that improving the medical tourism sector will lead to better health care for the local people is a fallacy. The health problems in the country are innumerable ranging from infectious diseases to lifestyle diseases. However medical tourism only caters to a few select diseases or conditions. The benefits a country will get through medical tourism such as Forex; do not make much of a difference to the common man and his healthcare needs. Medical tourism as such will only lead to internal brain drain and also exploit the majority of workers in a closed alien system which will have no relevance to the world outside. There is also the danger of creating expectations in the people much beyond what the country can afford leading to frustration. Conclusion: Applying the principles of social value in the Indian health care system, we see a gross mismatch between the inputs, outputs, outcomes and impacts. This has to be seriously addressed for medical tourism to have any social value in India.
