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COSTA RICA: Headhunting
First-World Seniors
By Daniel Zueras
SAN JOSÉ (IPS) - The Costa Rican government has declared
retirement communities, aimed at attracting U.S.
pensioners, to be "of national interest." Plans to
create "retirement clusters" providing complete health
services for older adults are seen as a profitable
prospect for this Central American country.
Old people as a business: this is the bottom line of the
government and private sector's new project.
Noting the rapid development of the "health cities" in
Mexico and Panama, Costa Rican officials and
entrepreneurs are poised to tap into the perceived gold
mine among middle and upper-middle class senior citizens
of industrialised countries.
The concept is simple, and includes slashing red tape to
the minimum by providing one-stop residence permits at
the Migration Directorate, so that foreigners,
especially the well-heeled, can come to live in the
country.
Tax exemptions on real estate and vehicles are on offer,
and a promotional campaign aimed at older adults abroad
will be run by the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism (ICT).
The government will also boost training of human
resources such as health personnel through the Costa
Rican Social Security system, and seek to attract
investment.
The Competitiveness Ministry has already identified
eight locations for retirement clusters in Costa Rica,
in areas of natural beauty with plenty of tourist
attractions, and close to large hospital complexes.
Promoting Costa Rica as a retirement haven includes much
more than boosting real estate sales or medical tourism.
"It includes the hotel sector, travel, hospitals and
research. Costa Rica will benefit from it,"
Competitiveness Minister Jorge Woodbridge told IPS.
Patients and their relatives are likely to travel all
over the country, staying at hotels and engaging tour
operators and so on.
Every 10,000 retirees are expected to generate
employment for 40,000 people a year, 10,000 of them in
direct jobs and 30,000 indirectly. The average income of
the target population (middle and upper-middle class
U.S., Canadian and Spanish citizens) is 3,500 dollars a
month.
The main Costa Rican medical centres are already
building two major hospital complexes in the city of
Liberia in Guanacaste province, the top tourist
destination in the country. They will comprise a
hospital and residential zone, where services will be
provided for four levels of care: active retirement,
independent living, assisted living and skilled nursing,
in increasing order of patient need.
A small retirement community for 12 people, the
country's only operational cluster so far, has opened on
the slopes of the Poas volcano.
The owner, Ronald García, told IPS that "coming to Costa
Rica has economic advantages" for foreign pensioners.
"They pay for accommodation and medical care, and a
family visit from home once a month, and it costs less
than paying for medical services back home," he said.
His customers pay 1,600 dollars a month, whereas in the
United States they would have to pay 4,500 dollars a
month for comparable services.
"We want to attract 10,000 pensioners a year,"
Woodbridge said. Estimated annual foreign exchange
earnings per 10,000 retirees are 340 million dollars,
"so in five years, the total would be 1.7 billion
dollars," he calculated.
In any case, the plan will take at least five years to
take off as a national strategy, Foreign Trade Minister
Marco Vinicio Ruiz told IPS.
Other Latin American countries have a head start on
Costa Rica. Mexico, which has been developing its policy
for over 20 years, is now home to 700,000 pensioners
from the United States who are living in Mexican
retirement communities.
Its other rival is Panama, which has been advancing in
this direction for about a decade. Panama has five
retirement communities at present, with another 42
currently being licensed and built.
But the government authorities are optimistic. The
climate, enormous biodiversity, security, stability, and
polls describing Costa Rica as "the happiest country in
the world," are factors that will work in its favour,
according to Woodbridge.
Costa Rica's reputation as "the Switzerland of Central
America" will also help.
Not everyone is in favour of the creation of this new
market, however. "It will affect the rights of the
people of Costa Rica," said Carlos Páez with the
National Union of Social Security Fund Employees (UNDECA).
Páez said "if this is put into practice, doctors and
nurses will go into private medicine," which could bring
about a crisis in the Costa Rican public health system,
presently stretched to the limit. "There is already a
lack of specialists and health personnel," and the
flight of these workers to private clinics and hospitals
will only increase the shortage, said the UNDECA trade
unionist.
"The first thing the country should do is to solve the
crisis in the social security fund, before opening the
market to additional demands," Páez argued.
Every day, some 6,000 people reach the age of 65 in the
United States. The baby boomer generation, born between
1945 and 1964, controls 77 percent of the available
financial resources of that country.
Forty-six million people in the United States have no
medical insurance, a fact that Costa Rica plans to use
to attract U.S. older adults to its shores. |
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