We have been half and half, Canada/France, for years now. Just set up house sitters for a 10 month French sojourn this time around.
It helps to have EU status, which we do because: ancestors.
It’s fascinating how each experience sheds light on the other.
But mainly, in France there are not so damn many cars every place. Where we live.
How are you managing residency and healthcare if you are going for 10 months?
Residency: one of us has an EU passport, just luck since dad was not yet Canadian when she was born. And for moi, it was not too hard to do the bureaucracy to get a "carte de sejour," or long-stay visa. After 15 years of renewals, it's now permanent. You can ask Canada for a Canadian long-stay visa for France, but in my experience, that paperwork took longer than the French paperwork. So much for the French red-tape clichés.
Health care: Canada and France both have socialized medicine, yay, and have made some kind of agreements about coverage. So, if a Canadian visits a French doctor, they bill you (say $50 Cdn for a consultation, maybe about your terrible allergies, or an ear infection) and then give you a form to claim the costs back from your provincial health plan. (Ditto at the pharmacy. You pay for the allergy drugs and they give you a claim form to take home. Works for the dentist too.)
It's kind of the same for the hospital--except they just bill the whole thing to your Canadian provincial plan, which then bills you personally for any difference in what's covered. As in, say an MRI is deemed to cost $1000 in Canada, and France tells your provincial plan that your French MRI cost $1500.00. You pay the difference. These are completely made-up amounts to illustrate the concept. For example, a friend had a hiking mishap and got all the ER tests and scans, a shoulder sling, drugs, etc., and ended up paying $300 Canadian once back in B.C.
So the gist of it is that, for everyday living, if you have no demanding health care needs, there's very little to think about. Another Canadian friend had emergency stroke care, with stents put in place, and it all worked as described above. Including the helicopter ambulance from their small village to the big city! Amazing.
We self-insure for the scary catastrophic prospects like emergency transport back to Canada. Yet another Canadian friend needed this, and because he was so elderly and frail, he required a nurse to accompany him. It cost many thousands. We keep the funds on hand.
One important thing though: if you are absent from your province for more than 6-7 months in a year (this varies by province), you may no longer be covered upon your return, until a designated number of months have passed. In our case, we can call the province's health care admin and say "we are leaving for a long sabbatical/work/educational trip and will exceed this limit next year." Supposedly this is OK to do, intermittently. This year will be our first test of this arrangement. Check with your provincial health care plan.
As for private extended heath care plans, once people hit their 60s this starts to be less and less useful. So we self-insure as I said.
As a general point, French people have enormously high expectations of their health system, and these are mostly met. There's a lot of private-sector involvement, but no one cares because it's still a single-payer government plan and most everything is covered. Some people pay a bit extra for "top-up" coverage, which they call "la mutuelle," like our Blue Cross, in order to get some supplementary benefits for glasses, etc. As I understand it.
