Outsourced Senior Parents to Foreign Nursing Homes: A New Form of Medical Tourism

September 20th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under • by admin

In the last few decades, many American retirees have moved to countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Panama and Costa Rica because they can live a much more luxurious lifestyle on their Social Security income than they could if they had decided to stay in the United States. Healthy seniors have been living abroad for some time now, but now the trend is moving to seniors who need nursing home care as well.

Living in a nursing home is an extremely expensive proposition in the United States. It can cost $40,000 or $50,000 to pay for such a habit, and in order to alleviate some of the costs, many families are now outsourcing their elderly parent’s care to nursing homes in foreign countries. This practice might seem a bit extremely, but it is also extremely cost effective.

The Chicago Tribune recently profiled a family who sent his elderly parents to a nursing home in India that was built to western standards. The man sent his 89 year old mother who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease and his 93 year old father who has Alzheimer’s disease to India. The cost for them is only about $15.00 a day, or about $5,500 a year! For this price, they receive better care there than in most nursing homes in the United States. The father has a full-time personal assistant and a cook. The mother gets massages, physical therapy and 24-hour staffing for any needs that she might have!

$5,500 a year is next to nothing compared to the nursing home fees the individual would have paid in metropolitan Chicago, where the cheapest nursing home to be had is $6,600 a month.

This is not a practice that’s to be recommended, since your senior parents may not be on this world too long, and you don’t want to find out that they are about to pass away and you cannot get to them since they are half a world away, but it’s an interesting result of globalization, the growing practice of medical tourism, and seniors living abroad.

Sending senior parents overseas to receive medical care really breaks some of the paradigms we have about senior care in the United States. If an Indian company can provide very high quality health care in a nursing home for just $5,000 a year, why can’t we in the United States? We certainly will have to pay more in salary, but chances are there are a number of other methods and means that American nursing homes could model that would enable them to save a substantial amount of money.