Introduction

Retirement migration is not only about geographical movement but also about people navigating between the policies of different states, such as those related to old age, public health insurance and residence or citizenship requirements. In countries of the Global North like the UK, Switzerland and the US, older people often rely on welfare state benefits for their economic security and their access to healthcare. In this context, the economic and health benefits that retirement migrants receive from their home countries, as well as whether they can access their state pensions and local healthcare systems in their host countries, influence their decisions about whether and where to migrate.

In this chapter, we use literature on work, retirement and health policies in later life to explore the political-economic contexts shaping the precarity of older people in the UK, Switzerland and the US. These three countries present especially interesting cases for study. On the one hand, they all contain retirement regimes and healthcare policies which assume that individuals (and their families) have the primary responsibility for security in later life. On the other hand, they provide different levels of protection to older people, both in terms of old age and retirement benefits, and ability to access healthcare.

In the following, we present an overview of the welfare state policies for later life in the three countries and indicate how they shape precarity at retirement age. We also discuss retirement migrants’ access to pensions and healthcare in their host countries: Spain, Costa Rica and Mexico.

Welfare state policies for later life in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States

Retirement and health policies are key to the ageing experiences of people in the countries of the Global North (Estes and Wallace, 2010). In terms of the former, since the Great Depression in the US and the Second World War in Switzerland and the UK, authorities have enacted policies aimed at reducing poverty among older people at the national level. As we will show, healthcare policies across these nations are rather varied. The British National Health Service Act (adopted in 1946) provides free healthcare to all, regardless of age. In the US, Medicare (adopted in 1965) offers low-cost access to basic healthcare to people aged 65 and over. Switzerland has no public healthcare scheme specific to older people.