Macau, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenue nearly 20 years ago, is launching a new front in its economic diversification efforts. This week, a resort hospital offering high-end medical services for tourists opened in the city, aimed at an affluent clientele and visitors from across the region.
Macau remains Asia’s largest gambling hub and at the same time is trying to shift its focus by adding a medical component to the usual casino-trip itinerary. The new infrastructure is meant to support a more resilient revenue model at a time when dependence on a single sector has already shown its vulnerability.
The pivot to new industries is largely being driven by Beijing. After the pandemic, Macau’s authorities have been more actively promoting areas that are easier to present as internationally competitive services, including healthcare, technology, and the events industry.
The pandemic was a stress test for the city, whose economy had long been sustained by a flow of gamblers. During Covid 19, casinos closed and revenue effectively disappeared, underscoring the risks of overreliance on a single sector. At the same time, gambling taxes still make up the bulk of budget revenue, so diversification looks less like a fashionable slogan than a matter of survival over the long cycle.
The facility is being billed as a resort hospital, that is, a resort hospital with the service model of an upscale hotel. The point of the format is that medical care is packaged as part of a leisure-and-consumption experience, rather than as a visit to a familiar city clinic.
The stated range of services focuses on prevention, diagnostics, and aesthetic medicine. The project lists the following areas:
So far, publicly available information is limited on the facility’s capacity, pricing, and how it fits into Macau’s regulatory framework. This leaves room for questions about whether the format can become a mass-market offering or will remain a niche service for a small group of visitors.
The initiator is the private medical group iRad Hospital. For Macau, not only the very fact of the clinic’s appearance matters, but also its placement in the city’s tourist core, where casinos, shows, and retail arcades are concentrated.
The resort hospital is located in the Studio City complex, a Hollywood-themed entertainment and hotel project. The site belongs to a Hong Kong group, and its proximity to casinos and leisure infrastructure looks like a deliberate attempt to sell healthcare by leveraging existing visitor traffic rather than building demand from scratch.
iRad’s business case rests on a simple tourism-market logic. If a trip gains an additional purpose, the likelihood of a longer stay increases, and with it spending on accommodation, restaurants, shopping, and entertainment. For Macau, where consumption has historically been concentrated around gaming halls, this is an attempt to broaden the spending mix without breaking visitors’ familiar route.
The case hinges on a few metrics that set the scale and the constraints:
At the same time, the effect of medical tourism is hard to forecast without data on what share of visits can be converted into medical-service uptake. Skeptics may argue that high-end care depends on trust in quality, pricing transparency, and physicians’ reputations—and that is built over years, not with a single opening.
The current dependence on casinos took shape historically. After Macau returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999, in the early 2000s the authorities liberalized the gaming market and opened it to global operators, which quickly turned the city into the largest gambling center by revenue.
Since then, Macau has repeatedly tried to expand the economy beyond entertainment, but the momentum of the casino boom proved stronger. Against this backdrop, Beijing’s message has grown increasingly explicit. During a visit at the end of 2024, Xi Jinping publicly emphasized the need for economic diversification and the development of new industries with international competitiveness, and medical tourism fits that framing as an exportable service.
In part, Xi Jinping’s proposal can be linked to the fact that the land-based casinos that fill Macau have begun to lose ground compared with the online segment of gambling entertainment. The proposal to develop new industries in this case seems logical—because if a modern player can get the same experience without leaving home, then the city must offer what the online sphere cannot. This assumption can easily be checked through a regular Google search—by the query “casinos in Macau,” our editors find here a site reviewing online casinos where you can play Monopoly Big Baller Live. This directly indicates that online gambling (iGaming) is expanding the boundaries in this competitive struggle.
The political backdrop also affects the trajectory. Macau was long considered more loyal to Beijing than Hong Kong, but in recent years observers have noted tighter control. Examples cited include low voter turnout in the latest legislative elections amid candidate disqualifications under a new law, the sentencing of one of the largest gambling magnates to 18 years in prison in 2023, as well as the introduction of a new security law aimed against foreign influence and the opposition. Symbolically, this aligns with the “common prosperity” line, where the conspicuous luxury of Macau’s gambling showcase can look politically awkward.
Choosing healthcare as a candidate to replace part of gambling revenue looks pragmatic. In Asia, a well-established habit of traveling for procedures and treatment has already formed, and affluent demand often overlaps with the audience of premium resorts and major urban hubs.
Regional competition is tough. Wealthy patients go to South Korea for cosmetic surgery, to Singapore for high-tech treatment methods, and India attracts with lower prices compared with Western countries. By market estimates, the global medical tourism industry is worth tens of billions of dollars and may grow noticeably over the next decade, but the share in that growth goes not only to clinics, but to entire ecosystems where care quality, service, regulation, and transport function as an integrated offering.
