PlanetHospital: Medicine Beyond Calabasas and America

A pioneering “medical tourism” company based in Calabasas, CA is gaining nationwide attention for finding “outsourced” surrogates in India.

If you can’t have a baby of your own and the prices of surrogacy are too much, you might want to look at PlanetHospital, a Calabasas-based company that isn’t a hospital, but a firm that coordinates dozens of different types of medical procedures for people around the planet.

The Wall Street Journal reports that in the first eight months of this year they sent 600 couples or single parents overseas for surrogacy, nearly three times the number in 2008 and up from just 33 in 2007. All of the clients this year went to India except seven who chose Panama. Most were from the U.S.; the rest came from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, mostly Japan, Vietnam, Singapore and Taiwan.

Mr. Rupak, Planet Hospital’s President, also told the paper that because of growing demand from his clients for eggs from Caucasian women, he’s started to fly donors to India from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where he has connections with clinics. The first woman arrived last month.

If you’re thinking about traveling oversees or interested in optional medical procedures, you can find more information about PlanetHospital [link] here.