Note №36WHO IS ALLOWED TO REFER YOU
If a coordinator, agency, or acquaintance arranged your procedure in Seoul and was paid for arranging it, that arrangement sits on top of a criminal prohibition. Korea’s Medical Service Act bans referring, brokering, or luring a patient to a medical institution for profit. The penalty is up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 30 million won. There is no professional exemption: the text begins with anyone.
Foreign patients are the carve-out. Not one of several — the single one that matters here. The statute suspends the referral ban for the specific purpose of attracting patients from abroad, and then a separate Act attaches conditions to that suspension: both the clinic and the facilitator have to be on a government register, and a registered clinic owes the patient a short list of things in writing.
Most foreign patients never learn any of this, because the register is in Korean and the paperwork obligations are written as duties owed to them rather than as rights they can name. This note sets out what the statutes actually say, what the registration means, and where the register can be checked.
The default rule: brokering patients is criminal
Article 27(3) of the Medical Service Act (의료법 제27조제3항) reads, in the operative part: no person shall, for profit, introduce, broker, or lure a patient to a medical institution or a medical practitioner, nor abet such an act. Two features of that sentence do the work.
First, the subject is “no person” (누구든지). It is not limited to licensed intermediaries or to registered businesses. A hospital marketing employee, a hotel concierge, an influencer taking a per-head fee, and a friend collecting a commission are all inside the sentence.
Second, the ban reaches the clinic as well as the broker. The phrase “nor abet such an act” (이를 사주하는 행위) puts the party who instigates the referral inside the same prohibition. A clinic that commissions a broker is not a bystander to the broker’s offence.
Article 88, subparagraph 1 (의료법 제88조 제1호) sets the sentence for a violation of Article 27(3) or (4) at imprisonment for up to three years or a fine of up to 30 million won. Article 27(4) separately bars insurance companies and their agents and solicitors from foreign-patient facilitation.
The exception exists, and it is defined by who you are not
The proviso to Article 27(3) lists exceptions, and subparagraph 2 is the foreign-patient one. It permits acts undertaken to attract a patient who is a foreigner and who is not a subscriber or dependent under Article 109 of the National Health Insurance Act.
That second condition is the part people miss. The carve-out is not written around nationality alone. It is written around enrolment in Korea’s national health insurance. A foreign national who lives in Korea, works here, and is enrolled in NHI is not inside the exception — for that person the ordinary criminal prohibition on paid referral still applies, exactly as it would for a Korean patient. The exception is for people whose care Korea is not paying for.
This is a coherent design rather than an accident. Paid referral is banned in Korea because it distorts a system in which most treatment is publicly reimbursed. Where no public money is at stake, the policy reason for the ban falls away, and the state instead wants the activity visible and regulated. Hence a register.
The exception is not automatic. It runs through a register.
The Act on Support for Overseas Expansion of Healthcare System and Attraction of Foreign Patients (의료 해외진출 및 외국인환자 유치 지원에 관한 법률, in force since 2016) governs the register. Article 6 requires anyone who wants to attract foreign patients — a medical institution or a facilitating agency — to register with the Minister of Health and Welfare, and sets different conditions for the two categories.
A medical institution must hold medical accident liability insurance or an equivalent arrangement, and must employ specialists in the departments for which it intends to attract patients. An agency must hold guarantee insurance, meet a capital requirement, and maintain an office inside Korea. The statute states the categories of requirement; the numeric thresholds sit in the Enforcement Decree, which this note did not read and therefore does not quote.
The government service listing for the medical-institution registration gives a standard processing period of about 20 days, with the application filed to the Ministry of Health and Welfare through the online system (gov.kr, accessed 2026-09-03).
What a registered clinic owes you in writing
Article 8 of the same Act is headed “Protection of the rights and interests of foreign patients” (외국인환자의 권익 보호), and it is the provision most worth knowing, because it converts registration from a licence into a set of documents.
Article 8(1) requires the registration certificate to be displayed in a place where anyone can see it. Not filed, not produced on request — displayed. If you are standing in a clinic that says it treats foreign patients and there is no registration certificate on the wall, that is a fact you can observe without asking a question.
Article 8(2) requires a registered medical institution to post the rights of foreign patients in a foreign language, keep printed copies available on the premises, and separately provide the patient with three specific things:
| Item | What the statute names |
|---|---|
| 1 | The diagnosis, the method of treatment, and the side effects that may occur |
| 2 | A treatment contract and an estimate of expected medical charges, on a form prescribed by the Minister of Health and Welfare |
| 3 | The dispute resolution procedure applicable if a medical accident occurs |
Item 2 is the unusual one. A written cost estimate on a ministry-prescribed form is not a courtesy that a good clinic extends; for a registered institution treating a foreign patient it is a statutory deliverable. That is a different thing from the price list a clinic shows you on a tablet during a consultation, and it is worth asking for by name. What the expected charge will actually contain is a separate question — cosmetic procedures lose the VAT exemption that ordinary medical care enjoys, which changes the number by ten per cent.
Article 31(1), subparagraph 1 makes a violation of Article 8(1) — the display duty — punishable by an administrative fine of up to 5 million won. This note confirmed the sanction attached to Article 8(1). It did not confirm which sanction, if any, attaches specifically to a failure under Article 8(2), and does not assert one.
Both sides have to be registered, not just one
Article 24(1) lists the grounds on which a registration can be cancelled, and two of them are structural rather than disciplinary.
Subparagraph 3 reaches a registered agency that refers a foreign patient to a medical institution which is not registered. Subparagraph 4 reaches a registered medical institution that accepts a foreign patient referred by a party which is not registered.
The consequence is that registration only works in matched pairs. An agency’s registration certificate tells you nothing about the clinic it is sending you to, and a clinic’s certificate tells you nothing about the agency that found you. Each has to be checked separately, and a mismatch is not a technicality — it is a cancellation ground for whichever side is registered.
Where the register can be checked
Two routes exist, both operated by or through the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (한국보건산업진흥원) under the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
The first is the foreign-patient facilitation information system at medicalkorea.or.kr, whose front page carries lookups for registered institutions by business registration number, and for facilitating institutions by name or region. The interface is Korean-only. This note did not test whether every lookup completes without a login.
The second is a downloadable dataset. The Institute publishes the status of foreign-patient facilitating institutions as open data on Korea’s public data portal, data.go.kr, as a free CSV and through an open API. The edition listed on the portal when this note was written contains 6,921 institutions, with fields for institution number and status, name, representative, facility type, and location, and is scheduled for annual update (accessed 2026-09-03). It is a spreadsheet rather than a search box, which for a reader outside Korea is arguably easier: a name search in a downloaded file does not require reading the site.
For scale: 6,921 registered facilitating institutions is the supply side of a market that recorded 2.01 million foreign patients in 2025, of whom 62.9 per cent went to dermatology.
What this note does not establish
It does not establish how often Article 27(3) is enforced against unregistered facilitation of foreign patients, or whether prosecutions occur at all. Enforcement statistics were not located.
It does not establish the numeric thresholds in Article 6 — the capital figure for agencies, the insurance coverage amounts, or the specialist headcount formula. Those are in the Enforcement Decree and Enforcement Rules, which were not read for this note.
It does not establish what the ministry-prescribed treatment contract form looks like, whether an official English version exists, or whether clinics in practice hand it over. The statute creates the duty; this note did not observe compliance.
It does not establish that an unregistered clinic is unsafe or unlicensed. Registration under this Act is separate from a medical institution’s licence to operate. An unregistered clinic may be a perfectly ordinary Korean clinic that simply does not participate in the foreign-patient scheme — but if it accepts patients referred by a facilitator, the referral sits outside the carve-out.
It does not give legal advice, and nothing here should be read as an opinion on any particular arrangement.
Common questions
Am I committing an offence by using an agency?
The prohibition in Article 27(3) is directed at the person who refers, brokers, or lures for profit, and at the person who abets that act. The patient being referred is not named as an offender. The exposure sits with the facilitator and with the clinic that commissions one.
Does the foreign-patient exception apply to me if I live in Korea?
The proviso is written for a foreigner who is not a subscriber or dependent under Article 109 of the National Health Insurance Act. If you are enrolled in Korean NHI, you fall outside the wording of the exception, and the ordinary prohibition applies to anyone who refers you for profit.
What should be on the wall of a registered clinic?
Article 8(1) requires the registration certificate to be displayed where anyone can see it. Article 8(2) additionally requires the rights of foreign patients to be posted in a foreign language, with printed copies kept on the premises.
Can I ask for a written cost estimate before treatment?
Article 8(2), item 2 requires a registered medical institution to provide a foreign patient with a treatment contract and an estimate of expected medical charges on a form prescribed by the Minister of Health and Welfare. This note did not verify what that form contains or how consistently it is used.
My agency is registered. Is that enough?
No. Article 24(1), subparagraph 3 makes it a cancellation ground for a registered agency to refer a patient to an unregistered medical institution, and subparagraph 4 makes it a cancellation ground for a registered institution to accept a patient from an unregistered referrer. The two registrations are checked separately.
How do I look up a clinic if I cannot read Korean?
The open dataset on data.go.kr downloads as a CSV containing 6,921 institutions in the edition current when this note was written, including institution name, representative, facility type, and location. A text search in that file does not require navigating a Korean-language site. The lookup interface at medicalkorea.or.kr is Korean-only.
Related notes
Other rights in Korean clinics that exist as a form rather than as a favour: the operating-room camera must be installed, but recording it requires a written request, and your treatment records remain claimable after you have flown home.
Sources
- 의료법 (Medical Service Act) Article 27(3), (4) — National Law Information Center, law.go.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- 의료법 Article 88, subparagraph 1 — law.go.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- 의료 해외진출 및 외국인환자 유치 지원에 관한 법률 Article 6 (registration) — law.go.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- Same Act, Article 8 (protection of the rights and interests of foreign patients) — law.go.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- Same Act, Article 24(1), subparagraphs 3 and 4 (grounds for cancellation of registration) — law.go.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- Same Act, Article 31(1), subparagraph 1 (administrative fine) — law.go.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- “외국인환자 유치 의료기관 등록 신청” service listing — gov.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- 한국보건산업진흥원 「외국인환자 유치기관 현황」 open dataset — data.go.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
- 외국인환자유치정보시스템 — medicalkorea.or.kr, accessed 2026-09-03
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