Living in US part time

After nearly 15 years in the UK, I am thinking I want to return the the US due to family members getting older, ill, etc... I am worried about leaving completely and wonder if anyone has experience of leaving for 6 months as a time? I have the potential to make decent money for six months here in the UK and then thinking I could go to US and live for 6 months and return to UK,, and so on.

I don't want to fully break free mainly thinking about health insurance and cost of medications as i have a number of them that I get for free here. Does anyone have experience being able to have NHS given them six months of meds at a time rather than a monthly ration? Also, what do you do with your car while you're away and other practical arrangements I probably haven't thought about?

Kind regards,

Steve P.

We have done it the other way round, leaving the USA for 6 months at a time. We did this after we retired early in 2010 and used to escape the Texas heat every year for 5 or 6 months at a time. I was only on 1 medication at a time using a mail-in program getting 3 months supply at a time and managed to get ahead of the game and have 6 months supply on hand. Our son kept an eye on our place so could forward on extra if needed, plus he monitored our mail each week.

We did this for 7 years before moving to England, and our trips of 5 to 7 months each year were not always to England. We maintained our US health insurance PPO plan which covered other countries so I would research in-network facilities before we left and make a record of them in case we needed them.

Once a month our son would switch cars and use ours to go to work etc. We had moved into a rental apartment so if our son ever did find anything wrong then he could inform the front office to have it seen to. (Fortunately that never happened). I bought a web-enabled camera that I set up pointing at the entrance to the apartment, and also a Nest thermostat so that I could check remotely that the AC was working okay.

These days I take 4 prescription meds every day which I get by mail through the NHS. I have got ahead by a month by ordering slightly early each month and now have 2 months supply on hand but these days we rarely go away for more than a month at a time as both our children have moved from the USA so the need for really long vacations has passed, and we simply take shorter but more numerous vacations than we used to.

If we didn’t have someone to look after the place while we were away I’m not sure how we would have managed.