Something many people (especially Americans) forget to consider when selecting a place to retire is the almost guaranteed need for lots and lots of high quality medical care wherever you end up. I suspect many people here on HN will retire with large enough retirement savings (and other assets) to settle down like kings in many places in the world. But the distribution of high quality care for ahem people of advancing ages, is very uneven and most of the places with better care have very high costs of living (e.g. Northern Europe) or very high costs of medical care (everywhere U.S.).
There's also a desire to try to make daily costs of living stretch more and many retired people will find themselves retiring to rural environments. However, those places may also be very far away from the kind of emergency medical care that's likely to be needed.
The intersection of decent cost of living, close to medical facilities, high quality medical establishment, and affordable medical care leaves not too many places in the world.
At the moment, my wife and I are considering retiring to South Korea (not Seoul) or Japan (not Tokyo) since those seem to be places with that rare intersection. I'm sure some places in Western Europe may also qualify.
I am from Turkey but living in US for 10 years now, and plan to retire in a low-cost area within the US, despite the fact that Turkey would have been much cheaper - but states is home now.
I don't think what you say is remotely true, though. Sure if you plan to live in high-cost areas in Europe, healthcare would be expensive, but taking Turkey as an example, the healthcare is very reasonably priced even in top private institutions, compared to what they would be in the US.
I do not have first hand experience for critical surgeries, but i have a recent experiences and learned what the price would be in Turkey.
> The intersection of decent cost of living, close to medical facilities, high quality medical establishment, and affordable medical care leaves not too many places in the world.
Health care in Vietnam is not not too bad, at least for the price. Surely you can't expect state of the art cancer treatments here but everything else is pretty affordable. My father just had an operation to fix his retinal detachment, everything costed less than 800 USD, and only 200 USD after insurance. Another guy I know had an operation for appendicitis, and he only needed to pay 200 USD for it. And both of them used special services, it would be even cheaper if they use normal ones.
If anyone want to move to Vietnam, pick Saigon/Danang/Hue/Nhatrang and stay away from the north until they fix their air pollution problem. It's pretty bad up there.
(source: I'm a Hanoian)
> Health care in Vietnam is not too bad, at least for the price.
Let us see...
My partner got what looked liked food poisoning when we arrived to Hue.
Local hospital refused to take us, sent to a special hospital "for foreigners".
She was put on a bed and kept waiting in pain for hours.
The doctor didn't bother to do anything for her for hours, despite not too many other patients.
We felt hungry, yet they refused to let us go.
After several hours waiting and feeling more stomach pain from hunger, I said, we absolutely have to go and eat something. Yet the doctor told us to keep waiting, refusing to let us go.
I started looking around for food and found a cafeteria on premises that was luckily still open (it was already late).
After a verbal fight with the doctor, he finally allowed us to go to eat in that cafeteria.
It was already late and dark and I had told the doctor, we would be leaving now unless he does something.
After more verbal fights and repeated insistence, the doctor wrote a quick prescription without even checking and sent us to pay about USD 100!
However, by the time he gave it to us, the hospital pharmacy was already closed. And no other pharmacy on the street would have that medicine.
So we came back around midnight, with no medicine, wasted many hours, spent USD 100 on nothing.
Would I call it "not too bad"? Well, if it was any more serious, we would have to fear for our lives is all I can say.
I'm a native VNmese in HCMCity. My wife is a doctor, we also have lots of friends/relatives working as doctors, pharmacists,... so I hope my sharing is not quite irrelevant.
In VN, you can get medical service with the same quality as US, if you know the right place to go. Sometimes you can find doctors with excellent proficiency, since VN is a good evironment for doctors to practice their skill and knowledge (rare cases, severe cases due to bad sanitary & healthcare mindset).
But again, the biggest challenge is that "right place". Not all great doctors work in the biggest hospitals, and not all well-known doctors are great.
I'm sorry to hear that. It seems that we are still not used to deal with foreigners yet, especially outside HN/SG.
> Local hospital refused to take us, sent to a special hospital "for foreigners".
This was the red light, Hue central hospital is actually very good (I have been there myself). It would be better if you had a local to guide you, maybe I should develop a website to help expats in Vietnam... Still what was the name of that hospital 'for foreigner' you mentioned?
Do you know about the quality of VinMec? For VinSchool I've heard from friends who attended that they have incredible teachers and from advertisements that they have professors from ivies helping them out, so I was wondering if VinMec is also top tier. They claim to have equipment "equivalent to leading hospitals in the US, UK, Germany, Japan and Singapore" so I wonder if they also have the skills to use it effectively.
Vinmec has been poaching doctors from public hospitals with their much higher pay. But they still can't get the very best ones for some reasons (I heard those doctors like to help people and not work for money). So VinMec has good service, but don't expect the best doctors over there.
Based on my medical care in the USA I can assure you Asian doctors are,at the very least, at the same level as US doctors. It sounds like an insult to my ears.
Ironically some of the SEA countries probably have better medical services than Tokyo.
You guys are criticizing me for calling Asia a monolith but I can assure you the difference between Tokyo and Myanmar is smaller than NYU and the Midwest
Very true. But for every Cleveland Clinic there are a hundred other midwestern cities that lack a similar tier institution, but you might have three similar institutions to CC in NYC or on the west coast to choose from. Having to drive over an hour to see your specialist while you are senile is not ideal, but is a reality for a lot of people in the midwest by virtue of the sprawl and low density of services.
Have you commuted or driven around NYC or LA? Unless you live in the same neighborhood, your commute to the hospital is already going to be 30-60 minutes. Not to mention that of the top hundred hospitals in the country, only a handful are in NYC or LA.
One could make an argument that living in rural areas is worse than urban ones when it comes to access to top medical care, but that has nothing to do with the NYC/LA vs. the rest of the country.
Of course there are institutions in the midwest. Some of the best universities are in the midwest. But practically if you lived in, say Lodi, it would take you over an hour to drive to the cleveland clinic main campus to see a specialist. That might be fine while you are 35 but untenable when you are 85.
The services are there but the density is low and the sprawl is wide in the midwest, and your only option is the car or to be entirely dependent on a relative to shuttle you to your appointments as public transit is anemic to non existent outside of chicago.
Based on where my wife and I are thinking of retiring (Korea, Japan), I believe I said that they were within the intersection of high quality and reasonable cost. You've understood what I've said in exactly the opposite way.
The resources can be better. I can't find it right now (and don't have the time to look for it), but there's some interesting studies that show at least in South Korea, there's something like 3-4x the number of medical imaging devices per capita than in the U.S.
Costs are fractions of U.S. costs. For an extraordinary number of medical situations, one could fly to Korea, get treated, stay in hotels or nice recovery centers (medical hotels), and fly back and still spend less money than in the U.S. with very competitive medical outcomes.
I think you guys are missing the joke. The users experience is with the U.S. health system. Because the stereotype and the parent comments have the implication that doctors from Asia are seen as inferior; the joke being that the U.S. sets a fucking low standard for quality of care.
Yeah because I'm explaining someone else's joke to you. Like it or not some of the comments here are perpetuating that stereotype. It's also a disservice and naive for one to claim that the there isn't that stereotype.
Uh why do you think retirees choosing a place to retire are “forgetting to consider” healthcare costs? If anything that is the #1 thing most people think about.
There's also a desire to try to make daily costs of living stretch more and many retired people will find themselves retiring to rural environments. However, those places may also be very far away from the kind of emergency medical care that's likely to be needed.
The intersection of decent cost of living, close to medical facilities, high quality medical establishment, and affordable medical care leaves not too many places in the world.
At the moment, my wife and I are considering retiring to South Korea (not Seoul) or Japan (not Tokyo) since those seem to be places with that rare intersection. I'm sure some places in Western Europe may also qualify.