Foreign Medical & Dental

While in Turkey we decided to get an annual checkup and dental work done. What we discovered totally blew our minds!

In the US, a major issue is health insurance because the cost of uninsured healthcare is so astronomical, which is cause for concern if you are planning to change your lifestyle to a liveaboard cruising life. The dilemma is, 'what if' I get sick and need care in a foreign country and what will it cost. Before we left the states this season, we opted for a medical insurance plan with a high deductible to keep the premiums down and it excluded dental coverage altogether. We covered that in our podcast Choosing Medical Insurance.

While here in Turkey, we learned about their medical system which was delightfully surprising and experienced it first hand. In our podcast Foreign Medical & Dental covering this experience, we revealed that a man off the street annual check-up exam with every single test under the sun, speaking with all the major specialists you could imagine cost us only $133 USD per person!

We wanted to share the summary of what it covered and also the breakdown of individual costs.

This is offered under what Turkey calls, Tourism Medicine, or Health Holidays which they are getting famously well known for.

Here's the individual cost breakdown for all the services as well. While you can't read Turkish probably, you can generally understand some of the items to give you an idea since the words are soft of similar. All prices are in Turkish lira which at the time of printing this blog is $1=12tl.

Crazy right?

I'm also in the process of getting four new crowns since my old ones are old :-). The total cost will end up being around $800 USD. Just by comparison in the US, with great medical coverage through my work, I had spent roughly $2,000 out of pocket after insurance for one crown I had done about two years ago. So in this case, I get four for just a tenth of the price.

Over the years, Turkey has been rising as a prime destination across Europe for medical tourism, specifically for planned surgeries, dentistry, hair transplants and plastic surgery. So if you need anything done medically speaking and want to combine it to a vacation in a beautiful country, we definitely recommend Turkey!