Atsuko Arai sees a doctor as many as a dozen times a month. The 75-year-old Tokyo retiree has no chronic conditions; she sees these sessions as a way to stave them off. "If I go to the doctor at the frequency I do, I won't get so sick that I need medication," she says.Japanese seniors, who enjoy the world's longest life expectancy, pay as little as no yen ($1) out of pocket for specialist appointments. While these visits may help prevent expensive-to-treat diseases, they're becoming unaffordable in a country where almost 1 in 7 people is 75 years old or more, and annual health-care expenditure grew at a pace 40 times faster than the economy from 2000 to 2016.
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