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Aug 16, 2007 -- Outsourcing your elderly parents to India?!

Have you heard about American retirees moving to Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panama because their social security checks go so much further abroad? This is a trend among healthy seniors, but now families who can't afford to pay for senior nursing care are taking a cue and outsourcing their elderly parents! Clark wants to clearly state that he's not endorsing this practice; he only wants to bring awareness to it. India is one of the hot spots for this new trend. The Chicago Tribune recently ran a story about Indian nursing homes that are built to Western standards. The article profiled a man that sent his parents -- an 89-year-old mom with advanced Parkinson's and a 93-year-old dad with Alzheimer's -- to India. The cost is about $15 per day -- a tremendous savings over the facilities we have here. For that price, the mom gets massages, physical therapy and 24-hour staffing for any need, while the dad has a fulltime personal assistant and a cook. Their cost of living is so inexpensive that it only eats up two-thirds of their social security checks. Compare that to nursing home fees in metro Chicago, where the cheapest one is $6,600 per month. Again, Clark is not recommending that you ship your parents off to India when they can't care for themselves. He's just noticing that so much has changed these days with medical tourism, seniors living abroad, etc. The real disadvantage is that you can't visit your parents too often because the cost of flying to see them is prohibitive.
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