growstuff
Kali2
Yes, and she was correct.
I was responding to YOUR comment, which I copied above. It is in fact very difficult NOW for EU older retirees to come and retire in UK.
I don't personally know any EU citizen who wants to live in the UK, so I can't comment and I'm not comparing. All I know is that my sister and her husband (who aren't retirement age yet) had been planning to live in rural Spain. They've both been learning Spanish in preparation. They were assured that they would be able to get residency and knew they would have to pay for private healthcare. If the UK had still been in the EU, they wouldn't have had to pay. No healthcare company will accept them, so they can't get residency. No thinking outside the box is possible.
We retired to France 13 years ago. Then the state pension age for women was 60, which I was and so we were able to get into the French health system and my DH, who is the same age as me, was accepted into the health system as my dependent. We had S1s which confirmed that the UK would be responsible for paying for our health care (Don't ask me how that happens)
Friends who retired here when they they hadn't reached state retirement age had to take out private health insurance. They are now in receipt of their state pensions and are in the French health system.
We do pay "top up" insurance. For the 2 of us it's now around 190 euros per month (we're aged 74 and 75) . It doesn't have to cost this much - the level depends upon whether you want a private room or a willing to share and there are some other differences.
When we arrived we didn't have to take out the top up insurance and I did consider not paying it because if you have a terminal illness, once diagnosed you pay nothing. However, a friend told us that we would have to pay towards diagnostic tests which can be expensive so we started to pay immediately.
I'm glad we did because whilst my DH was fit and healthy in England he has had a number of problems since we arrived here. One evening he had pains as if he was having a heart attack. At 11.00pm I called the emergency services and a doctor arrived within 15 minutes. She did an ecg which didn't detect anything wrong with his heart. she called the SAMU (paramedics) who came with a larger machine but the result was negative. It was obvious that he was in pain and so the pompiers were called and he was taken to hospital. In the early hours of the morning the doctors realised that he had pericarditis. Eventually we got an invoice showing that the cost of all this was around 4000 euros. We didn't have to pay this.
We have to pay whenever we visit the doctor -now we pay 7.50 euros per visit - it's more if you're younger. We rarely have to wait for a doctor's appointment, unless he's on holiday and we can either wait until he comes back or go another doctor.
Because the UK was in the EU when we became resident our state pensions increase in line with the UK state pensions. That will continue as part of the Brexit agreement.
We don't get the winter fuel allowance because the govt decided that the average winter temperature is higher than the warmest region of the UK. The reason being that they included the temperatures of the French overseas territories in their calculations. ie the West Indies where the temperatures are higher.
It is more complicated to retire here now but it can be done and there are now quite high fees to pay. I think we paid 40 euros for our residency application.
The question of Brexit still rears its ugly head. There are a few English couples in our village who voted for Brexit and they have fallen out with Remainers (indeed they called one couple traitors) and they have annoyed some French people because they talk about how they moved here because land and houses were so much cheaper and they make little effort to mix with the French locals.
Finally, no problem with finding a vet here.
