Being a military retiree promised free health care for life if I made it a career (during Vietnam) I am not happy with Medicare. We retired to Hungary and Medicare doesn't work outside the US (except Puerto Rico). However, I am eligible to have Tricare Overseas if we each pay a monthly Part B supplement to Medicare once we reached age 65. I tried using TRICARE which is so awful it is beyond description. It costs an additional $600 per person per year plus an annual deductible of $1,200 plus the Part B payment ($148.50 each) to get 60% for allowable costs covered with a lot of limitations. To use it you use your regular medical visits/emergencies etc., pay for it, then submit a claim for the total. The error rate on claims runs over 400% (meaning even after resubmitting 4 times it is still wrong). They subcontracted it to a private contractor that is awful and has claim adjustors that do not even understand that in the entire rest of the world that a comma is used for decimals. Only the US uses periods. They also have no ability to translate Hungarian but refuse to let the claimant do the translations. They also do not understand currency conversion rates. I believe the military health care system set this up deliberately to make it completely unusable. They also added a requirement that only claims paid by check or credit cards will be paid. Cash receipts are no longer accepted. Here in Hungary, the medical system is a government National Health Care plan which we are ineligible to participate in not being citizens. Citizens pay roughly $25 a month for complete coverage to get excellent care. So, we use the same public system but must pay cash. The government is not set up for payments so it is always a struggle to get this paid for and always only using cash) or use private doctors/clinics that also are mostly cash only. Because these are (mostly although credit cards are slowly being accepted) cash payments, nothing is covered by TRICARE so I told them to shove it. We both get letters from the US government at least monthly trying to get us to re-enroll so we must not be alone in this regard.
On the plus side, medical treatments are really cheap and far below even just the Part B payment. The quality is as good as anywhere else although the facilities are generally drab no-frills and usually the lights are off during the day, windows open as there is no air conditioning etc. I am used to it having worked in military hospitals most of my life which were similar although are becoming Americanized and like luxury hotels now. When you don't have these enormous expenses it is a lot cheaper to run. Also, all physicians are government employees and on fixed salaries which are modest. They stay as they love their country and are in it to help people and not get rich something that has been lost in the West and especially the US.
