Escape US Healthcare Crisis: Affordable Global Alternatives & Relocation Strategies

US healthcare is overpriced and low-quality; consider relocating for better, more affordable care.

### Escaping the US Healthcare Crisis: A Nomad Capitalist Perspective
* 🌍 The US has the most expensive healthcare with low quality, even lagging behind emerging nations.
* 😡  The recent shooting of a UnitedHealthcare CEO highlights public anger towards the system.
* 💲 A simple ER visit cost the author $2,000, illustrating the high cost of US healthcare.
* 🏥  The author recommends annual checkups at Prince Court Medical Center in Malaysia for ~$200.
* 📉 US life expectancy is falling, now at 76.1 years, lower than some emerging countries like Spain (mid-80s).
* 🇺🇸  The US system focuses on **cure** over **prevention**, with issues like poor food quality and 5,000 chemicals in food due to FDA loopholes.
* 💰 Americans pay **twice as much** for healthcare as other developed countries, with high administrative costs and doctor salaries.
* 🌎 The author advocates for moving overseas for better, more affordable healthcare, citing examples in Malaysia and other countries.

It's been no secret for many years that the United States has the most expensive health care and yet some of the lowest-quality health care in the developed world.

Heck, a number of emerging countries are now outpacing the United States in terms of quality and efficiency of care. But the shooting death of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has

brought new attention to just how bad US healthcare is.

I'm going to share with you a different perspective on this.

There's been a pretty trite joke for years that I'm against murder and I don't care who knows it. Apparently, that's

not even a joke anymore. Today we're going to walk through just how bad US healthcare is, that people are literally

willing to resort to violence to protest it. I'm going to tell you why that's the case, share with you some facts and

figures, and tell you how I would solve this problem from the Nomad Capitalist perspective.

Years ago, I chose to leave the United States. It wasn't for this reason, but I just felt in general the United States was going in the wrong

direction. And yes, when I needed health care, I had bad insurance. I was happily self-funded, but a simple emergency room visit cost

me $2,000 once. That was a long time ago, before some of the recent inflation. So what I'm going to tell you is:

You want to go where you're treated best when it comes to healthcare.

One thing that I tell people who come to Nomad Capitalist's countless live events, our annual event to do, is go to Prince Court Medical Center and get an annual checkup. The cost of the flight and

the hotel, and even coming to our live event is probably going to be more than paid for in the savings. I do an annual

checkup there every single year. It costs like 200 bucks and it takes only a couple of hours. It's UK-trained

Physicians come and help me. I'll talk more about other experiences I've had later in this episode, but my perspective

is that you can solve this problem; you don't have to stay and be a victim. What I do know is that you're not going to solve

healthcare in the United States in your lifetime, uh, no matter where you're at. This, to me, is a systemic issue, and if

you think Medicare for All is going to solve it... it seems like a pretty hard thing to get enacted. But if it is, and you're

middle class or above, it's going to hit you hard in the pocketbook. If you're our clients, who are seven- and eight-figure

entrepreneurs and investors, it is going to add to your taxes a lot. So, for me, I don't see any great solution. What I do

know is that no matter how bad things get, UnitedHealthcare just puts a fence around their office; they're going to

hire more security. CEOs are calling security companies at the fastest clip in recent history. They're not going to necessarily change their policies;

they're not going to necessarily be better. If you think they're going to change because one guy gets shot, I don't

know that that's going to be the case. And yet, vast majorities of Americans are saying the system is terrible. 62% of

Americans want the government to get involved and do something about that. I am a free-market capitalist guy; I

believe that you're paying way too much in taxes in the United States, especially if you're wealthy and you're not getting

much in return. What I'd rather see is you pay a lot less in taxes and be able to fund affordable healthcare, but again,

I don't see that happening in the United States. This is why I say, if you're successful, you want a backup plan,

because taxes are going to keep going up in the long run because people want the government to step in and solve their

problems; here's what the alleged killer, though, has gotten right in his manifesto: US life expectancy is going down. I sat

in a chair just like this one four years ago and shared these stats that even during the middle of COVID, countries were

stabilizing; the US kept going down. People said, "You don't get it; it's just about COVID; it will pick back up." It hasn't.

The US life expectancy has fallen off a cliff. Life expectancy at birth today is 76.1 years in the United States. There

are literal emerging countries who have longer life expectancies. We just filmed "Live Like a King" in Madrid; Spain has

some of the longest life expectancies in the world; they're up in the mid-80s. That

9 years is a big difference. So you're paying a lot of money in taxes, you've given a lot of power to politicians,

you're paying more money for healthcare than ever before; you're outpacing every other country in the developed world. I'm

not saying this is a Bernie Sanders-style, uh, populist or socialist; I'm saying this as a person who's a

pragmatic capitalist: where's the value for the money? It's just not there in the US, and people seem to think the US is

the best place; they have the best healthcare. Well, why is it people are dying at younger ages than in emerging

Asian countries and emerging Latin American countries? Yes, Japan, Spain; they top the charts. There are countries—literally in emerging Asia—

people are living longer than they are in the United States. You can't say it's the number one country. One thing I tell

uh, my team is, we want to focus on root causes rather than symptoms. Overall, experts agree the US system is based on

cure rather than prevention. Food is some of the worst in the world. When we've taken our clients all around the world,

particularly Americans, we point and say, "Hey, there's where your dinner is coming from tonight." There's much more of a

fresh, organic approach to food in many parts of the world. It's been a big story since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been

appointed to join the Trump administration. He's been talking about chemicals. Now, whether you agree with him or not, the fact is there are

5,000 different chemicals in food due to what they call loopholes in the FDA rules. So again, if food quality, if food

safety, if longevity, if healthcare is important to you, then what are you getting for your money's worth in the United

States? Your money's paying for, among other things, the FDA, and they have 5,000 chemicals in the food. Perhaps that's

part of it. But I recently found an article in *The Economist* that outlined some of the key issues, not with the

quality of the food, not with how people are dying earlier, but why the actual healthcare system, driven by this public

private insurance model, is just so bad in the United States. Some of the points that they made were that people talk

about corruption and greed among insurance companies, but that big hospitals are also to blame. My concern, and I've said

this for years, is that people think very emotionally; they don't think logically. They're upset with health insurance

companies, and you know what? I can't entirely understand, because I left the system. I didn't like the way the United

States ran healthcare.  It wasn't the big reason, but I did think, "Why, why, why does it cost so much here?" And I went to

places where I don't have to worry about this. So you're right, I don't have the same level of anger that someone sitting

in the United States dealing with UnitedHealthcare or any of the rest of them has. I have health insurance in various

In Malaysia, my health insurance costs less than $500 a year for a 40-year-old. When I asked what it would cost if I had cancer and needed complete treatment, they said it would cost under $100,000.

I saw someone talk about spending almost that much for an appendectomy in the United States, and they had to go to the emergency room.

To be able to treat cancer over a long timeline at that cost—the same as an appendectomy in the United States—I mean, quite frankly, the $500 a year I'm paying for insurance that would cover that cancer treatment, I could self-fund that cancer cost.

Americans may not be able to do so. Now, if you moved overseas and you lowered your taxes and your cost of living, you could.

Yes, I have made a personal change in my life where I don't understand as much what's going on where folks are getting denied by their health insurance companies.

But one thing the article talked about was our hospitals overbilling.

Thirty years ago, my sister and I were in Hawaii on a family vacation as kids. She almost drowned in the ocean and went to the hospital. She was there for 3 or 4 days. You get the bill; it's $50 for an aspirin—and that's in the 90s.

Right about when American life expectancy was peaking, before so many other aspects of the country's trajectory started going down.

So to me, it seems like there's probably a lot of people with dirty hands in this, where everyone's grabbing their piece of the pie. It's a land rush to basically bleed the population dry.

How do you fix a systemic issue like that? I don't know. My thought is, go where you're treated best; find a place where that systemic issue doesn't exist.

I'll talk about that in a moment. About a third of Americans don't...

Know what's covered in their health insurance plans. Now you know that's probably true in a lot of places. Uh, you

know, health insurance plans, they're complex, and yet you pay so much to still be confused. That is a problem. The

article talks about AI taking over decision-making and how that's increasing denial rates. I'm not saying

that the healthcare industry is perfect. I'm saying I don't see how it gets fixed. I do not put my faith in politicians. I

put my faith in my own ability, in my close-knit inner circle, in my own team, in my own family. That's where I put my

faith, and that's why I've made the choice to say, 'I don't like this system; I'm going to go and live somewhere else.'

Americans pay more for care than anywhere else—twice as much and growing at a faster rate than other developed

countries. It's up 300% in my father's lifetime. Four times the amount that's

spent on healthcare since 1960, and that's due to implausibly high administrative costs—a lot of administration. It's

also due to higher doctor salaries. Uh, the lowest part of that is the extra cost of having better machinery. So very

little extra spending on innovation; mostly extra spending on administration. The same thing that makes, you know, university in the United States

so expensive: lots of admin, lots of consultants, lots of everything. That's the culture in the United States. You

can't say even in socialist countries that's the case. I mean, building a mile of railway in France costs a heck of a

lot less than it does in California. Why? The US culture's admin, consultants, lots of fluff that even

other high-tax, more socialistic Western countries don't have. Lots of admin, lots of people getting their little piece of

The pie—you think any of those people want to give up their piece of the pie? We have many doctors and dentists as

clients in the US that make high six-figure and seven-figure salaries. Some own multiple clinics and employ others; some

just are very, very well-paid doctors. Here's the issue: you can blame the doctors, and maybe some folks will, but

here's the thing: the US has fewer doctors than any other rich country, and that's what drives up salaries. Why is

that? Nobody wants to become a doctor. Well, the article suggests one thing: a tight federal cap on doctor residencies

that stops more from being trained. Kind of like how we're seeing a housing crisis all over the world, and people

want to blame foreign investors who are coming for Golden Visas in Portugal. They got rid of real estate as a Golden Visa

investor option, which is one reason I say: if you want a second passport, if you want a second residence permit, strike

while the iron's hot. Golden residence purchasers, I think, are under 1%; that's not what's moving the needle, but

it's always easy to point to somebody else. Do I think UnitedHealthcare is doing a great job? I don't know. It sounds

like they deny a lot of people. Are there reasons for that? Is someone else to blame? I don't know; that's not my problem

to solve. I walked away from it, and so can you. What I do know is the government in the United States has caps on

things that prevent prices from coming down, and we're seeing housing shortages; we're seeing, apparently, shortages of

doctors that are making it more expensive. The US has also seen a rise in surgeries that aren't covered in other

Why US Healthcare Sucks

Nomad Capitalist can help you legally reduce your taxes overseas, become dual citizens, and protect your assets internationally.

We help our clients as both the architect and general contractor of holistic offshore strategies that ensure they stay compliant while saving money, building wealth, and protecting their assets and families.

We've spent more than a dozen years building the world's preeminent network of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, notaries, and other professionals and act as a bridge between them all to provide the most complete done-with-you service to aspiring global citizens.

Nomad Capitalist

High Cost and Low Quality of US Healthcare

The US has the most expensive healthcare with low quality compared to other developed nations.

Emerging countries surpass the US in healthcare quality and efficiency.

The death of a UnitedHealthcare CEO highlighted the poor state of US healthcare.

Personal anecdote about a $2000 emergency room visit in the US.

Recommendation to seek healthcare abroad for better quality and affordability.

Example of affordable and high-quality annual checkup in Malaysia.

The speaker believes the US healthcare system is a systemic issue unlikely to be solved.

Advice to have a backup plan due to rising taxes and healthcare costs in the US.

Comparison of US Life Expectancy with Other Countries

US life expectancy is lower than many emerging countries.

Significant life expectancy difference between the US and countries like Spain.

Experts agree that the US system focuses on cure rather than prevention.

Concerns about food quality and the presence of numerous chemicals in food.

Analysis of the US Healthcare System's Issues

Discussion of corruption, greed among insurance companies, and overbilling by hospitals.

Comparison of healthcare costs in Malaysia versus the US, highlighting the drastic difference.

Anecdote about high hospital bills in the US, even for simple treatments.

Many Americans are unaware of their health insurance coverage.

Americans pay significantly more for healthcare than other developed countries.

Underlying Factors Contributing to High Healthcare Costs

The US has fewer doctors than other rich countries, leading to higher salaries.

Federal caps on doctor residencies limit the number of trained doctors.

The US performs more surgeries not covered in other countries with government-funded healthcare.

Other countries are shifting from complex surgeries to simpler treatments and prevention.

Solutions and Alternatives to the US Healthcare System

Moving to a country with lower living costs and taxes to afford healthcare.

Personal experience of affordable healthcare in Malaysia.

High-income individuals can save significantly by moving overseas for healthcare.

Options for those unable to move overseas, such as medical tourism.

Even with high taxes, safety isn't guaranteed in the US.