5/31/24
Lurko may want to write more about this because it was a major reason for him to want to move here. For me as well. I know the U.S. healthcare system is garbage; I’ve watched it chew up and spit out so many of my friends. For me personally, I have not had health insurance since I became an independent contractor in 2018. I keep struggling with the idea of health insurance, though. To me it feels like gambling, and I hate gambling. It feels super shitty to throw away money on the off chance that I might win. And “winning” in health insurance doesn’t mean you get any of those premiums back. It just means you get screwed slightly less on hospital bills. You still have to pay.
In the U.S. I had no health insurance for 6 years. I joked that my health care plan was “don’t get sick, you can’t afford it.” And for six years, I was lucky….no accidents, no major illnesses. I got COVID post-vaccine and shook it off without getting hospitalized.
In Mexico, my health care options as a Temporary Resident are:
- Get private health insurance
- Buy into the government health care program (IMSS)
- Pay as I go
Private health insurance is expensive for ex-pats. That population tends to be older and richer, so I have not seen pricing that is even remotely reasonable. There’s often a clause of “if you get really sick, we’ll airlift you back to the States so you can see a real doctor.” I won’t pay for that because I don’t have a doctor in the states. They all retired or moved away. My “real” doctors are all here in Mexico.
I don’t have enough information yet about private health insurance for Mexicans. It’s not something that can be easily Googled, partly because medical Spanish is still hard for me to wade through, and partly because they don’t make that information easily indexable on the web. I’ll have to get back with you on that.
IMSS is something I am still interested in enrolling in. The price seems reasonable, and the doctors/ hospitals are said to be competent. However, I keep hearing stories about understaffing, and friends waiting 6 months to have a procedure done. If I have something wrong with me, I want it taken care of before it gets worse. Which leads me to…
Pay As I Go is my current reality, and so far it has not been terrible.
-In February, Lurko and I had a consult with the GP who my parents had been seeing for years. We paid to have a lot of lab work done- we were worried about things like cholesterol and cancer and anything else a couple of 50-year-olds who hadn’t been getting regular checkups might have. The consulta was free. For the labs, the two of us paid $472 US, or $236 each. Our doctor admitted it would be cheaper in Puerto Vallarta – doing it in Punta Mita meant we were paying for a courier service to take our samples to the labs. But as expensive as gas is, and PV being an hour away, Lurko and I agreed the convenience was worth it. As many tests as we did, it was still probably cheaper than if we had done it in the States with no insurance.
- In March, I visited a gynecologist for an annual exam, and to discuss replacing my expired IUD. That visit cost $52.97 US.
- In May, on the orders of the gynecologist, I visited a diagnostic lab to get a mammogram and a bone density check. Nice, well organized facility, good doctors and modern equipment. I paid somewhere between $50-$100 US, it was in cash.
- Later, I needed a biopsy to check out a suspicious calcium deposit in my right breast. They presented two options, I chose the hollow needle biopsy because it sounded the least complicated. You can read more about that disaster in another post, but the short version is the procedure was a failure, they apologized profusely, and they returned every penny of the $18,000 pesos ($1,060 US). I was flabbergasted when they offered the refund. That would NEVER happen in the States!
- Unfortunately that meant I needed the more expensive kind of biopsy, one that required surgery with anesthesia. But the price tag on that came out to $3000 US, with 3/4 paid now and the rest to be paid at the follow-up in 2 weeks. That experience was as good as a biopsy could be, again with caring competent staff and modern hospitals and equipment. I do not think I could have gotten better care for the price in the US or the Mexican state-run program.
This is a pretty big topic, and we still have a lot more to say about health care in Mexico. I’ll add our experience with dentists and pharmacies in separate posts, as well as the Biopsy From Hell.
