Medicine and health insurance

In my experience, some medications are cheap, some are expensive, in Lima.

If you're moving to Lima, the price of meds should not be a dealbreaker unless you take some exotic medication(s) that would be super-pricey in any country.

If you'll be here in November as a tourist for, say, three months .. stock up first at your home pharmacy.  Get three months worth of your medications before your flight.  Bring a copy of the prescriptions from your doctor in case you are questioned by airport security.

cccmedia in Peru

Hello all,
I am writing on behalf of my sister-in-law, Juana, who is Peruvian and came to US as an adult 20 years ago.  She is now 57.  She has never learned English and I have represented/advocated for her for 20 years ‘through thick and thin' during her time here.  She is going to be naturalized as a US citizen sometime within the year (things have been really backed up) and we have plans for her to relocate to her childhood home in Peru…on the coast south of Lima.  She would be living there with her brother in the family home.  We don't anticipate that she will have a formal job, but she may do some odd job things that appear, selling things, etc… she will have income from her retirement account until that is exhausted and then Social Security pension.  While she will not be wealthy we know that her money will go farther there than it will here in the Seattle area.
Here is our main concern – she is on a few medications (while still being active) and we are concerned  about how affordable they are going to be there in the Lima area and what is the best way to go with regard to health coverage of some form.  We think that the ‘international health insurance plans' I see on the web seem to be especially costly…are there plans that she could purchase there that would be more affordable and would help her defray costs of prescriptions, one of which is insulin?  I am hoping that we can have a plan set up before she would actually make the move and that the experienced expats on this forum will be able to help us have an idea of what we are facing.  I am sure that I will have other questions in the future about this and other issues.  Thank you.

In order to support Juana's situation while maintaining the integrity of this new-members-intro thread, I have asked the Home Office to move Yanqui1's post to the Medicine and Health Insurance thread that was formerly active on this Peru Forum.

cccmedia
Expat.com experts team