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With the large number of current and projected future retirees moving to CR what will happen as we REALLY become “senior” citizens? From what I have read the major shortcoming of the CR medical care program appears to be the area of nursing homes. Yes, people appear to be healthier and live longer in CR but what happens when the old body parts and minds don’t work so well?? You don’t see a whole lot of information around about this but I think it is something that we will all have to be concerned with in the next 25 to 30 years
The baby boomers that are retiring now will need more medical care than the younger generation and as they get older they may just need more and more care. Speaking frankly many of the boomers will need either nursing home care or in home care that would at some point in time be too difficult for their spouse to handle.. Anyone care to share their ideas on this??
This is an area of ENORMOUS opportunity that nobody is talking about…
I have discussed this with dozens of developers and with the demographics the way they are, I continue to be stunned that nobody is doing anything about it.
To a certain extent, I guess it would be simple for a condo developer to offer ‘assisted-living’ type care (part-time nurse or regular doctor’s visits) as an additional service but, nobody that I know of is building a project with the specific goal of ‘long-term care’ in mind.
The one thing that people forget about is that it’s not just the elderly that are affected. When your parent is going through a serious illness or dying and one of the children (meaning you, your siblings or wife) has to give up working to care for them, that can be an enormous burden on the entire family.
A good alternative would be to put them in a long-term care facility in Costa Rica which could be arranged for a fraction of the cost of ‘back home’ and those ‘children’ could continue working knowing that your parents are being cared for…
Of course another option would be to buy a home in Costa Rica for your aging parents to live in and hire a full time or live in nurse to care for them. That way they are cared for and you have an asset that should appreciate over time for your own retirement. The biggest potential problem here would be managing the staff from a distance.
We are all going to die and it’s amazing how ignorant most of us in the ‘first-world’ are about death and dying. As a Buddhist, my ideas about death may be slightly different than yours and I have literally read hundreds of books about ‘death and dying’.
Then again as a namvet, maybe you have also been exposed to Buddhism?
If I were to encourage someone to read something on the topic, I would suggest that ‘Dying Well’ by Dr. Ira Byock is a definite ‘must-read.’
What shocked me about this book was that Dr. Byock created a classical music group that would visit the terminally ill and play what he would consider to be appropriately spiritual and meditative type music and I was amazed to realize that I own every single piece of music that he recommends by contemporary classical composers like Arvo Part, Henry Gorecki and John Tavener.
My “bible” or manual about death and how to die is ‘The Tibetan Book of the Living & Dying’ by Sogyal Rinpoche which you can see at
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comSo Scott has anyone in CR approached the idea of a condo or rental units that have assisted or non assisted living? In Mn it is becoming really popular to have a rental that is non assisted then going into assisted living when you need too. Price starts at 1300 then goes to 2500 to 3000 a month depending on the situation.
I could see this as a great investment because of the on site health care situation.
Hey by the way I met Randy Berg yesterday for lunch in MN, he is a nice guy!Most of what ails the aging boomer population is caused by a horrid diet comprised of junk and “fast” foods, lack of exercise, and pure gluttony. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t have stats that idicate 60%+ of our population is morbidly obese. Diabetes is rampant in the US, and that leads to blindness, strokes, loss of limbs, neuropathies. I had the pleasure of meeting George Lundquist and one of his boomer tour groups on a recent trip to CR. Every single person in his group was 50 – 100 pounds overweight. One was in a wheelchair, one was on oxygen, one walked with the cane, and the rest of them were huffing and puffing on a 50 yard walk. In the morning I saw several of them popping a handful of pills. We know that obesity leads to diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and some cancers. Most of what ails America could be prevented or reversed by a healthy lifestyle, which I would hope people would adopt when they move to Costa Rica. It will be a pity if there is an influx of these patients into Costa Rica who will absolutely put a drain on Costa Rica’s fragile medical system. The nursing home industry in the States has basically deteriorated into little more than warehousing the elderly until they die. There has been scandal after scandal about how patients are treated and with what drugs, many times it’s a chemical straitjacket that makes the person docile and nonconfrontational. Many of these drugs have sudden death as a side effect, especially in the elderly. A nursing home should be the last ditch choice for an aging or ill person.For a fraction of the cost of a nursing home, one could hire fulltime nursing care in one’s own home in Costa Rica. Seems like a far better option than being stuck in some ghastly facility from which nobody escapes alive.
The good news in this discussion is that the overwhelming number of people in the U.S., at least, never need long term care. If you were playing the odds, you wouldn’t be worrying about this one.
That said, one option for gringos here is to purchase the “right” long term care policy from a U.S. (or maybe an international) insurer. Before we ever decided to move to C.R., Marcia and I bought long term care insurance which specifies that our own physician (not the company’s bureaucrat) determines when we need the policy’s benefits and which services we need. It also provides for services which are provided by non-medical personnel. If what we need is assistance with (say) bathing, dressing and eating, that can be provided by a capable person who is not medically trained. And our policies pay for care outside the U.S.
If you’re at all inclined to buy LTC insurance, you can’t do it too soon. With each passing year, the premiums go up disproportionately to the lifetime cost.
I have recently become interested in Buddhism and it has had a really positive effect on my life in general.
Sounds like a great idea. Where would one go to get such a policy that would apply in the US and CR?
Thanks. Jessica from Plano, TX
Our long term care policies are with CNA. We looked at several, but CNA offered the best options as far as flexibility and control were concerned. We want the control to be with us rather than with some faceless bureaucrat sitting in a call center in Pakistan and making medical care decisions for us.
Another feature of the CNA policies is that, while each policy gives Marcia and me three years (I think) of care coverage, the two of us also share an additional five years of coverage. So if I need care for eight years, it’ll be covered; if we each need five years of care, that’ll be covered, too.
CNA should have agents all over the place in the U.S.
Scott..didn’t really have an opportunity to learn much about Buddism. You might be too young to remember but 1968 Vietnam was not a great place to be. A lot of people got “foxhole” religion but one’s major goal in life at that point in time was staying alive and retaining all of your body parts!!
As a business opportunity the nursing home idea might be tough. It would appear that there are 2 types of people who will move from the states. Those who have “made it” so to speak and are coming for a better quality of life. There will also be those who come because they simply cannot make it on their fixed incomes (social security, pensions and so forth)in the states. The more fortunate group will probably have long term care insurance and/or the financial wherewithall to hire someone to live with them and administer to their needs. I think that the opportunity here (if it is legal) is to set up a caregiver type employment agency to fulfill this need for live-in care givers.
What happens to the other group? They cannot afford live-in help and in all probability do not have long term health care insurance. They probably will not be able to afford to live in an assisted care facility. Based on this who would rent an assisted care apartment?
This is the problem. The “unhealthy” are usually the “unwealthy” and not necessarily through any fault of their own. This has the potential to place an overwhelming burden on the entire medical system of Costa Rica but it may take 15 or 20 years to come about. Someone will have to pay for this and it may well be that expatriots might have a revised pricing schedule on their dirt cheap health insurance.
This is all fine and good with the long term health care and I am glad that a lot of people have the insurance which is really important.
How ever if you are like the majority of U.S. citizens you will might not have this option like my mother.
My mother was 70 when she found out she had Parkinson and after a couple of years it went down hill. She had to move out of her town home and into a none assisted living and by next year she might have to be in the assisted living section. It is a perfect set up because she doesn’t have to move, they have a nurse staffed for 24 hours, breakfast is included in her rent and it doesn’t have the nursing home feel. These are really new apartments that are only for seniors in later life. She is now 75 years old and racking up the medical bills like crazy. She praises that she has blue cross and blue shield which they are raping her for 700 dollars a month and she is paying 400 dollars on pills. Her pills would be more but she had insurance for her pills. When she sold her town home she came out with enough money to last her for the next 15 years but only if she was in a non assisted living. When she hits the assisted living it will knock her down to 10 years or less.
Now I know a lot of people are not in that situation but it is a growing amount of people that are. Just think if they had a development in CR that could cater to seniors in that situation. With the cost of living and cheap medical costs this could make life a lot easier for many people that are facing issues in their senior years.
Just having good insurance won’t solve the problem because 10 years from now what happens if the cost of health care doubles? Do you think that the long term health care insurance will be able to pick up the bill?This would kind of be like shipping a problem off to another country. The reason medical care is so cheap in CR is that at some point it has to be subsidized by the government. I tend to think we would be taking a great deal more out of the system then we are putting into it. You would obviously be paying for assisted living and care but would be taking advantage of the cheap medical insurance.
I think there’s a big difference between retiring in Costa Rica at let’s say 60, being able to put something back into the country in terms of the economy, volunteer work or whatever and moving there solely because the health care is less expensive. The government would probably have to put a “gringo” tax on health care premiums.
The solution to health care in the US lies in revamping the entire systm not shipping our problems off to Costa Rica.
This is a very interesting thought that you brought up about shipping the problem to another country.
The difference is if you start up a development for senior living you could use the lower cost doctors to be full time staff as well as the other employees. You would be giving back to the economy by hiring these people. Even if you had to pay more for private hospitals in Costa Rica it would far out weigh the cost of the U.S. system. You can ask my brother in-law that employees eight doctors to do medical exams for drivers. The doctor only receives 45 percent of each payment that is made; the rest goes to my brother in-law.
A person that is living on SS from the U.S can afford paying $100.0 dollars in Costa Rica’s health care versus the $1,000 in insurance monthly payments that they would pay in the U.S. You know Medicar and Medicade won’t be around for ever!
The Costa Rican health care system would love to have U.S. citizens come to help out with the payments on the health care system versus the problems that they have with the northern neighbors that don’t pay anything.
Trying to change the health care system in the U.S. will take centuries due to the high wages and many other issues that plague that system. Just subsidizing the U.S. system won’t help when everyone wants more money! If anything this is like a blank check for the health care system to keep raising the costs! You have to stop the bleeding and that means puting caps on everything in the health care system. The government would have to put caps on everything from wages to bed pans. This would be a very unpopular choice for a president to make since the U.S. believes in free economy. Again this is why Costa Rica is a great alternative! I am sure the bed pans in Costa Rica don’t cost as much and the U.S. bed pans!
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