Vietnam wants American patients, and the pitch has moved from posters to paperwork. Nhan Dan reports the Viet Nam National Authority of Tourism courting the US as a priority market for long-stay, high-spending visitors, with medical travel named among the most promising areas for cooperation between the two countries. The raw material is there: nearly 850,000 Americans visited Vietnam in 2025, part of a record year for the country’s tourism. But the coverage never quite asks the question that decides everything. Around 40,000 Vietnamese still fly abroad for treatment every year, spending about $2 billion between them. Why would Americans fly in while Vietnamese with money fly out?

A tourism agency makes the healthcare pitch

At the Hanoi discussions covered by Nhan Dan, Nguyen Thi Hoa Mai, Deputy Director General of the Viet Nam National Authority of Tourism, described the US as a major source market and a long-standing partner, and said Vietnam wants more visitors in the long-stay, high-spending segment that medical travellers occupy almost by definition. James Peranteau of the US Embassy returned the compliment, picking out medical and healthcare travel as one of the most promising areas for cooperation and crediting Vietnam with reasonable costs, improving service quality and a qualified medical workforce. “These are important advantages that can help Viet Nam enhance its appeal to international visitors, including those from the US,” he said of the country’s assets. Both sides leaned on the same structural advantage: the large Vietnamese community in the United States, whose trips home already combine family visits with long stays, and whose members can vet a Ho Chi Minh City hospital the way a local would.

The diaspora point is the substance here, and it deserves more weight than the scenery Peranteau praised alongside it. A Vietnamese American booking a health check or dental work during a family visit is not a medical tourist who needs persuading; the airfare is already justified and the trust already exists. What I notice is who is doing the talking. This is the tourism authority selling healthcare, with no health ministry official quoted alongside. Vietnam’s health and wellness market is being marketed a step ahead of being built, and that gap runs through every number that follows.

The visas and the flights are already in place

The access layer is genuinely done. Under Resolution 127/NQ-CP, in force since 15 August 2023, Vietnam issues e-visas to citizens of every country and territory, valid for up to 90 days with single or multiple entries and accepted at 13 international airports, according to the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington. Vietnam Airlines, the only Vietnamese carrier with a direct US route, flies nonstop from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City in about 15 hours, four days a week. The headline numbers reward the effort. The Viet Nam National Authority of Tourism and the National Statistics Office counted nearly 21.2 million international arrivals in 2025, up 20.4 percent on 2024 and 17.8 percent above pre-pandemic 2019, with the US the fourth-largest source market.

A 90-day multiple-entry e-visa is a better medical product than most governments realise. Staged dental work does not fit inside a two-week holiday visa; a document that lets a patient enter, go home, and come back for the follow-up within three months does. Vietnam built that for tourists and got a patient visa for free. The flight map is thinner, a single West Coast gateway, but a 15-hour nonstop from San Francisco puts Ho Chi Minh City within one flight of California and its Vietnamese American communities.

The hospitals have more to prove

The clinical layer is where the pitch thins out. The proof point everyone reaches for is FV Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, JCI-accredited since 2016 and re-accredited in January 2021 with a 99 percent compliance score, 230 beds across more than 30 specialties, with foreigners making up about a quarter of its patients, mostly from Korea, Japan, France, the US, Canada and Cambodia. Note the hospital’s own framing, though. FV says it develops to international standards “so that Vietnamese citizens do not need to go abroad for treatment.” The wider system numbers come from the US International Trade Administration’s country guide, updated in March 2026: Vietnam’s health spending passed $22 billion in 2024, hospitals in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City absorb up to 60 percent of the country’s patients and operate beyond capacity, and the private sector’s 384 hospitals amount to 24 percent of facilities but just 5.8 percent of beds.

Read together, those figures explain the $2 billion outflow better than any survey could. The internationally accredited layer is real but narrow - FV is a 230-bed hospital in a country of a hundred million people - and the public system beside it is overloaded before a single inbound patient arrives. FV’s mission statement is aimed inward, at keeping Vietnamese patients home, and that is the honest sequencing. A hospital sector still working to convince its own middle class is not yet built to absorb American patients at scale, and every foreign arrival in the meantime competes for the same narrow band of accredited beds.

What This Means

Vietnam has done the fast, cheap parts of a medical tourism build first: visas, a nonstop flight, promotion, and a record 21.2 million arrivals to show for it. The slow, expensive part - accredited beds, spare capacity, a private sector larger than 5.8 percent of the total - lags years behind, and the 40,000 patients flying out each year are the honest measure of where domestic confidence sits. For now the credible offer is narrow and real: Vietnamese Americans folding dental work, health checks and elective procedures into family visits at a small set of internationally accredited private hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. That market needs no persuasion, only availability. The broader American patient, the one weighing Vietnam against Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur, will wait for proof rather than promotion. The signal I would watch is not arrivals but the outflow. When the $2 billion Vietnamese spend abroad on treatment starts shrinking, the hospitals will have won the argument at home, and that is the moment the inbound pitch to Americans stops being aspirational.