The accidental endorser: Rush Limbaugh on Costa Rica’s health care

private hospital in Costa Rica

During his March 8 show, conservative radio celeb Rush Limbaugh said that if the current U.S. health care reform is approved, he would move to Costa Rica.

He seems to have evoked Costa Rica as a place where there’s less “government intervention in health care,” but of course Costa Rica has more “intervention” in providing medical care for its citizens than does the U.S.

Igor Volsky, writing for WonkRoom, put it well:

“But unbeknownst to Rush, Costa Rica’s hybrid government-private health care system provides comprehensive universal coverage to all residents – and even sells affordable policies to soon-to-be visitors like Limbaugh. The government owns several major public hospitals and operates small clinics in almost every community. Workers are required to contribute 15% of their salaries to health insurance and the unemployed “obtain public funding for all health services, including prescription drugs.” At least a third of all Costa Rican residents receive some care in the private sector and the government regularly purchases services from private providers. The system is not without its problems, but it boasts a higher ranking from the World Health Organization – Costa Rica is 36, United States 37 – and has higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates. Costa Rica also spends less per capita on health care than the United States and insures almost all of its residents.”

In his ignorance of Costa Rica, Rush inadvertently endorses a system that he spends a great deal of air time vilifying. Sure, Rush, come to Costa Rica–you’ll see how a tiny country with fewer resources than the U.S. makes health care a priority for its people.

More information:

The basics of Costa Rican health care

Four expats weigh in on public and private care in Costa Rica

Expat residents must now enroll in Costa Rica’s medical system: So how is it? Four views

A public hospital in San José, Costa Rica

With the new immigration reforms that go into effect in Costa Rica next week, it looks like expats who are legal residents in Costa Rica must enroll in the national healthcare system,  the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social. Known  as the Caja, the system gives its members low-cost access to neighborhood clinics, pharmacies, and public hospitals.

Some Costa Rica expats are satisfied with Caja (public) care; others are most definitely not.

Visit Miss Move Abroad to read one whole-hearted and one half-hearted endorsement of the Caja, and two accounts of what can only be termed ordeals at public hospitals.

Most bizarre campaign video ever: Luis Fishman

A middle-aged man naked except for a diaper cavorts among pregnant women singing a takeoff on the 60s classic, “I will follow him.”

No, it’s not an underground video making the rounds in fetish circles. It’s a campaign video for Luis Fishman, who came in 4th of 4 candidates in this week’s presidential election in Costa Rica.

His campaign slogan? “El menos mal es el mejor” — the least bad is the best. Come again?

Costa Rica elections — photos

Costa Ricans went to the polls yesterday and elected the country’s first female president, Laura Chinchilla.

These election photos are by Adrian Hepworth, an award-winning British photographer who lives in Costa Rica. See more of his work at www.hepworthimages.com.

Laura Chinchilla, victor in yesterday's election, ran on a platform of being "firm and honest." Photo: Adrian Hepworth

Supporters of Otton Solis in yesterday's presidential election in Costa Rica. Photo: Adrian Hepworth

Costa Ricans elected Laura Chinchilla in yesterday's presidential election. Photo: Adrian Hepworth

Costa Rica elects female President

Yesterday Costa Ricans went to the polls and overwhelmingly elected Laura Chinchilla president for the next 4 years. Chinchilla, who was Vice President in the current administration of Oscar Arias, resigned that post so she could run for president.

She ran a campaign that declared her “firme y honesta” — firm and honest — and promised more doctors in the state-run medical clinics and more police officers on the streets. She is a social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortions.

She won 47 per cent of the vote; Otton Solis from the Citizen Action party and Otto Guevara from the Libertarian Movement party conceded defeat with 24 per cent and 21 per cent respectively.

Chinchilla, 50, is married with one teenaged son. She will take office in May, becoming Costa Rica’s first female president and Latin America’s fifth in the last two decades. The other four are Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who was elected in 2007, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, elected in 2006, Panama’s Mireya Moscoso, elected in 1999, and Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro, elected in 1990.

Click here for election photos.

Quien is mas treehouse? Life in the Costa Rican trees

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit, ‘Quien es mas macho?’ The contestants included Jack Lord from Hawaii-5-0 and Ricardo Montalban, who consistently came out on top.

Here we have a variation on that theme, with all the Costa Rican treehouses I’ve visited vying for the honor of being treehouser than thou.

One thing Ive noticed in my treehouse travels is that everyone has a different idea of what a treehouse should be.  Even the highest-ranking contestants–Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community on the Southern Pacific coast, and Michael Cranford’s multi-level masterpiece on the Osa Peninsula–have philosophical differences about what constitutes a treehouse.

Cranford didn’t want to drill into the enormous Guanacaste tree that is now his home, so has his treetop home supported with wooden supports that go from the ground to the platforms that make up their home. Erica and Matt of Finca Bella Vista didn’t want support from ground so brought in experts from the States to rig their treehouses without support from below.

Here’s a sampler of the treehouses I’ve seen on this trip, starting with the whimsical and working towards the amazing feats of engineering and imagination.

1. The Treehouse Hotel in Arenal is fun but they’re not strictly treehouses—they’re cute little houselets up on stilts.

2. In Uvita, Tra McPeak from Memphis runs the Tucan Hotel, 100 meters east of the Costanera (the coast highway), a hostel with a restaurant, a pen full of rabbits, and high-speed wireless internet. They have a small wooden treehouse out front you can rent for $6/per person. The price includes hammocks but it’s extra for mattresses and bedding. Tra, who arrived in Costa Rica in 2006, says he built the treehouse for his kids but all the backpackers coming through wanted to sleep up there, so he now makes it available to guests.

Casa Arbol treehouse, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

3. Humbert deSilva from France and Lisa Brouillard from Quebec have been in Costa Rica for almost 20 years. They run a small bed and breakfast, Casa Arbol, not far from Chacarita, where you turnoff to go to the Osa Peninsula. Their entire house is a work of art—Hugh makes the cupboards and the bed stands and the baths that look like something out of ancient Rome, not to mention the small treehouse that guests can stay in if they like. He never knows how a project will turn out when he begins it. He kept showing me carvings and rooms and tilework and saying, ‘When I finished, I saw that it was a”….swan, or frog, or a meditation on humanity.

4. Finca Bella Vista : a treehouse community in the jungle

Eric and Matt Hogan of Finca Bella Vista

A few short years ago Erica and Matt Hogan were camped in the mud by the Bella Vista River, up a rocky road to a spread of gorgeous but undeveloped land in Costa Rica’s Zona Sur. They weren’t sure what exactly was going to get them out of the mud, but dreamed of building a kind of Ewok village where they’d live in the trees and get to their neighbors’ houses via zipline.

Most people would have let that rather whimsical dream sputter and die, but Erica and Matt nailed it down and created Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community with 82 lots available for people who want to live off the grid and in the trees. They’ve strung 18 ziplines, which they use fir both transportation and fun, but eventually there will be 45.

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

We stayed in the first treehouse they built, and once I was 50 feet up in a structure cradled by three trees, listening to the roar of a nearby waterfall (visible from the top floor), I sighed and thought, This is it. This is the real thing.

5. At home in the trees: Michael Cranford’s treehouse on the Osa Peninsula

Michael Cranford and Rebecca Amelia were drinking margaritas in Boquete, Panama, talking about how as kids they’d retreat to the trees when they needed to get away. A few hours and numerous drinks later, they were sketching designs for a treehouse on napkins.

Michael Cranford's treehouse in Costa Rica; photo by Michael Cranford

Years later, the scrawled blueprints became reality when they hauled a few platforms built on the ground up into an enormous Guanacaste tree on their land on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.

That was about a year ago, and Michael and Rebecca now live full-time in the trees, with Siete, a miniature husky, and Reina, an aging brindle boxer.

Breakfast nook in the treehouse;l photo by Michael Cranford

The treehouse is a true home, with a spacious, fully-equipped kitchen, guest bedrooms, an office for each of them, and a master  bedroom. Eighty percent of the wood used for the treehouse is downed hardwood from the jungle that is their backyard. They have internet and cable, flush toilets, and plenty of hot water in the shower.

They’ve seen a sloth right outside the kitchen, 3 kinds of monkeys—howlers, white face, and squirrel—come through regularly, and scarlet macaws hang out in the nearby branches.

They rent the place out occasionally—check their web site.

“I learned more about myself working with this tree,” says Michael, “than I have through any other life experience.”

Michael is a painter as well as an architect and visionary. “I moved down [to Costa Rica in 1998] to become an artist,” he says. He sold his painting contracting business in Colorado Springs, and gave himself “a window of 3-4 years to paint.” He painted 6 days a week.

That’s his goal this year, too—to do nothing but paint.  He created the painting below before he created his actual treehouse.

‘Avatar’ creators fund reforestation project in Costa Rica

Image from the movie "Avatar"

Giant Studios, creators of Avatar (a film released on December 18th), have come forward with the final infusion of funds needed for a reforestation project in Costa Rica

Avatar, directed by James Cameron, stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang.  Set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional inhabited Earth-like moon, the film portrays the mining of Pandora’s precious minerals. A race of humanoids indigenous to the moon, based in a settlement called Hometree, resist the human mining project, which threatens the Pandoran ecosystem.

More trees mean more monkeys; photo of baby howler monkey by Dan Wilson, co-founder of La Reserva in Costa Rica

It seems fitting that the creators of a film that explores the exploitation of ecosystems would fund “Connecting Forest Islands in Costa Rica,” a project of the Lake Arenal-area La Reserva Forest Foundation.

Giant Studies named their donation “Project Hometree.”

Turtle trouble in Costa Rica

A leatherback turtle; photo: scienceblogs.com

There was a great article in the New York Times in November about the plight of sea turtles in Costa Rica, home to some of their favorite nesting beaches.

I was recently in Tamarindo, a town just south of Playa Grande and its Las Baulas National Park (a baul is a leatherback turtle, which can be the size of a compact car).

In years past hundreds of leatherbacks came to lay their eggs in the sands of Playa Grande. The Times article says that just 32 leatherbacks were seen on the beach last year. And this year, locals told me, only a handful of turtles have been seen. The park’s ranger station had been shut down and, according to Alvaro Fonseco (quoted in the Times), Playa Grande is no longer being promoted as a place for tourists to see leatherbacks.

Five or six years ago I was part of a midnight turtle tour at Playa Grande, where a ranger led a small group of us, lighting our way with a masked flashlight (light disorients the turtles) to where a few leatherbacks were digging holes in the sand and dropping in their large, white flexible-skinned eggs. At that time, there were almost always a few turtles laying eggs each night. Now there have been only a few spotted this entire season.

Playa Grande and Las Baulas is close to Tamarindo, a burgeoning town where massive condo developments sit cheek by jowl with funky surfer hangouts. There’s been a recent moratorium on certain kinds of highrise building, but some projects seem exempt from the new rules, and enough got in under the wire that development is now encroaching on turtle territory.

And even the national park, already encroached upon, is under further threat. President Oscar Arias has floated a proposal that would protect the first 55 yards from the high tide mark but allow limited development on the next 80 yards. Critics say this would have the effect of making the area not so much a national park as just another zone for development, albeit with stricter rules for where lights can shine.

Expat Stephen Duplantier, a resident of San Ramon, and Alvaro Ugalde, former environment minister of Costa Rica, have put together an excellent online book about the current leatherback turtle situation in Costa Rica.

Many things threaten sea turtle survival, including development and its attendant lights, which can disorient the creatures and cause them to either not come to the beach to lay their eggs or to return to the water without having laid them. Drift net fishing (where there’s a lot of bycatch, or unintended catch, including turtles) is another culprit, as is climate change. Turtles can die in the hotter, more acidic seas caused by global warming, eggs on beaches are washed away by higher tides from more violent storms before they can hatch, and warmer sand can cause more females than males to be born, upsetting the gender balance of the turtle population.

When turtles lay eggs, the gender is not yet determined. Warmer temperatures produce more female eggs.

Playa Junqillal, where olive ridley turtles nest

South of Tamarindo is nearly-deserted Playa Junquillal, a favored nesting spot for Olive Ridley turtles. Even there, turtles are in trouble. Markers placed at the high tide mark are now often completely underwater, verifying that the seas, at least here, are indeed rising. Turtle eggs get washed away, eaten by predators, heated up to femalehood, or literally boiled by hot sands. A local crew of young people are paid $2/hour to collect the eggs and keep them safe in a hatchery kept at 85 degrees farenheit, which yields both male and female hatchlings.

Mobbed by grasshoppers in a Guanacaste treehouse

There's no escaping the bugs in a house with no walls; photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Imagine a house up in the trees, open to the elements, with a view of a pristine stretch of Costa Rican beach. It’s Paul and Jeanne Pidcock’s house , on the Pura Jungla eco-reserve, where Ray Beise took a dried-up cow pasture and lovingly reforested it into something lush and beautiful. He sells lots to like-minded people who agree to abide by the eco-friendly rules of the realm.

Sound good? Well, yes and no. In theory, the idea of no walls (and of course, no windows, and no screens) sounds pretty cool. You are one with the toucans and the monkeys.

And, it turns out, an army of insects.

Things got ugly at dusk. It wasn’t so bad if you sat in the dark and listened to the wind. But if you turned on a light—to cook, to read, or to write, you were mobbed by flying insects, from no-see-ums to oh-my-god-did-you-see- that?

Where in Costa Rica might there be screened windows? Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Leaf-green grasshoppers as long as my finger seemed especially friendly. They alighted on my book page, on my computer screen, and on the map I was studying to figure out the fastest road out of here. One crawled inside the bedside lamp I’d brought to the kitchen table (the lighting was dismal, probably because lights only attract bugs). The lamp was sideways so I couldn’t see the hopper’s body, but its long front feelers undulated out of the fixture as if the light itself had become insect-like.

When I conceded defeat and got up from my chair, I saw that I had sat on one of the poor little buggers.

Ping pong death match in Playas del Coco, Costa Rica

The Costa Rica government recently razed all the structures in the Maritime Zone on Playas del Coco; photo by David W. Smith

Expat life at La Vida Loca in Coco Beach: gringo men, local girls, beer and some serious ping pong

We park where the street dead-ends at the beach. The local crackheads are lounging under a nearby palm tree. One shambles across the sand towards us; over his skinny bare torso he wears a shredded Day-Glo orange vest—the kind Costa Rican parking attendants wear. “I’ll watch your car,” he croaks. We give him mock salutes to match his quasi-official garb. Of course we’ve taken everything out of the car so as not to tempt even the most desperate thief.

The beach looks different since they tore down all the ramshackle structures encroaching on the maritime zone, which is 50 meters up from the high tide mark. Building on this publicly-owned strip has always been illegal, but only in the past few years has the Costa Rica government made good on its threat to bulldoze any structures in the zone. Coco Beach looks better now without all the helter-skelter buildup; they’ve even built part of a running/biking trail along the beach’s north end.

La Vida Loca bar is accessible only from the beach. It’s an open-air complex with thatch and tin roofs and a squat cement mermaid out front that looks like a cross between the Hottentot Venus and a toad. But we’re heading for the back of the bar, where, amid hockey banners and hub caps and fish tanks lies what we’re after: the ping pong table.

Jimbo from Oregon runs the bar. He’s a Ducks fan, has gone through most of the local girls, and is by all accounts rarely sober. His kid from one of the women working the bar bangs a stick on the cement floor.

“There’s more fish now,” says Jim from California, surveying a tank with colorful fish and a pre-Columbian-style statue of a grimacing man with a huge erect phallus. “I remember when that gar was in a little tank, didn’t have enough room to turn around. Look at him now!” The long, skinny fish with a toothy grin has a tank all to himself.

Jim from California should not to be confused with Jimbo from Oregon. Jim married a local girl (she worked at the hotel where he first landed, fortyish and flush with U.S. cash) and now has two daughters that he’s putting through private school.  About his wife, he says, “It was between her and the head maid.” He and his wife aren’t together anymore but they aren’t exactly apart either. When she ran over a drunk in the road (in the Mercedes Jim shipped down in a container), he helped her pay restitution to the dead man’s family. (Interestingly, speed bumps here are called muertos, or dead men.)

And unlike Jimbo, Jim rarely drinks before 5 pm. He’s chugged only one or two tonight, mostly to counteract the strong coffee he drank to prepare for the match.

Ping pong is serious business at La Vida Loca on Playas del Coco in Costa Rica

The ping pong death match.

Jim and Dave have been here before. When they lived and worked together on a ranch in the Guanacaste highlands, the trip down to Coco for ping pong was one of the highlights of their week. They take the game seriously. Last year they even brought wood to repair the table, and they always bring their own paddles and balls.

Dave hasn’t played for a while; Jim plays often and has never been beaten on this, his home table. Jimbo the bar owner once offered free beer for life to anyone who could beat him. Jim beat Jimbo, but the life’s supply of beer somehow ran out after the first night.

Even the rally for serve is serious business. I go over to the fish tank several yards behind Jim to get a closer look at the gar. Jim stops, paddle in one hand and ball in the other, and looks over his shoulder at me.

“I might hurt you back there,” he tells me, his face serious, his body twitching with squirrelly energy.

And it’s on. The Jim Nabors twaing of ball on table belies the heavyweight spin and torque the players put into the game.

The first two games go to Jim.

The third goes to Dave. “I’m getting him up here,” Dave tells me, tapping his temple. “It’s all mental.” Dave reaches for his Pilsen and takes a long pull before heading back to the table.

Old surfboards are stuck pellmell in the rafters. There’s a foosball game over in the corner and a mannequin rocking some FlashDance garb. Oldies but goodies play on the sound system: Blinded by the Light. Hey There Little Red Riding Hood.

Someone comes over to watch for a while. I learn that when the fish in the heavily populated tank aren’t looking too good, Jimbo feeds them to the gar.

Rallies don’t last long. Serves are not often returned. One return hits the edge of the table and shoots under the fish tank.

Someone else tells me, “Jimbo’s doing pretty good here since all the other bars were torn down. This is the only beachfront bar left.”

Over closer to the bar, a pretty dark-haired woman sits in front of a laptop computer. Middle-aged men from the U.S. chat up lovely local girls a third their age. Skanky dudes hover around the periphery, ready to supply what allows the men to keep on drinking and still be able to extract their wallets from their back pockets to pay for another round.

There’s one North American woman sitting at the bar. Like me, she’s forty-something, and like me, she looks out of place here where there are really only two categories of clientele: older foreign men and younger local women. The men are here to live out certain kinds of fantasies that don’t quite fly back home, many of which include underage girls.

Even working class stiffs from up north are big fish down here where jobs are scarce and many women have 3 kids (and no husband) before they’re 20. A single man with some disposable income looks mighty good to them. And a sexy young thing whose Northern equivalent wouldn’t give these dudes the time of day looks mighty good to the men, who often profess to be fed up with the feminists up north.

One guy told me that you could tell American society was being feminized by the sitcom characters. All the women are competent and intelligent, he said, and all the men are doofs.

Jim's mantra: ping pong ping pong ping pong!

Back at the ping pong table, the match is going fast and furious. When Jim loses a point, he recites his mantra: ping pong ping pong ping pong. He jumps up and down, rolling his neck like a boxer between rounds.

At this point I lose track of the game. I’m nursing my Coca Light, watching the drama of first world men and third world girls. That I am neither gives me an odd feeling of dislocation, especially when I see the girls eyeing my man. More than one guy arriving in Costa Rica has dumped his age-appropriate sweetheart to frolic unfettered in the fields of nubility.

“You only live once,” is a common mantra down here, ironic because this is precisely where people come to  live out second and third and even fourth lives.

Ping pong photos by Erin Van Rheenen