From the OPP Feb 2010
The Costa Rican government is hoping to team up with developers to build residential health care centres for foreign retirees.
The Retirement ‘Cluster’ project, announced last week, aims to offer wealthy US pensioners a variety of medical services including nursing and research, as well as recreational facilities, as a cheaper alternative to medical provision in their own country.
Retirement communities create more than “two to three times” the revenue of the tourism or real estate sectors on their own, minister for competitiveness George Woodbridge told AFP. If the cluster developments were to attract 10,000 retirees, they could create 40,000 jobs and generate $340 million annually in foreign exchange, he said.
Costa Rica last year attracted 30,000 medical tourists, who each spent an average of $6,000 each in the country. This number is expected to rise as “medical costs continue to grow in America,” said Woodbridge.
Medical tourism from the US is likely to grow at a sustainable rate of 35% a year to reach 1.6 million patients by 2012, according to Deloitte’s 2009 report on the topic, which also names Costa Rica as one of the top ten most popular destinations for medical tourism.
Source: OPP Feb 2010, to read the article in full click here
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
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