a cluster · PanamaPanama City

Panama's capital and, for this subject, the whole of the country: 410,354 people in the city proper at the 2023 census, 2,100,189 in the metropolitan area, a US-dollar economy and a hub airport at Tocumen. Its private hospitals stand within a few kilometres of each other on the Pacific shore — Punta Pacífica, Paitilla, Bella Vista, Costa del Este — and they sell to two markets at once: people who fly in, and North Americans who already live here.

The institution the city is known for abroad is Pacífica Salud, which opened at Punta Pacífica in 2006 and added a second campus at Costa del Este in February 2022. Its own credential page leads with an affiliation to Johns Hopkins Medicine International held "since the hospital's beginnings" and renewed in 2017, extended to both campuses; it states a fifth Joint Commission International accreditation at Punta Pacífica and a first at Costa del Este, neither of them dated on the page, together with World Stroke Organization certification running 12 November 2025 to 12 November 2028.

A hospital's old web address is not a hospital. hospitalpuntapacifica.com, the domain the institution traded under before the rebrand, now answers with a permanent redirect to a slot-machine site; Inference — that is a lapsed domain bought by somebody else, and the reason this record cites the hospital's current address and nothing else. A reader following an old link, or a facilitator's stale directory entry, lands on a casino.

The older part of the cluster is smaller and quieter about itself. Hospital Nacional opened as Clínica Nacional on 9 July 1973, took its present name on 20 August 1998, and runs 80 beds — 8 adult and 5 paediatric intensive care beds, a 5-bed neonatal unit — with a department whose job is foreign insurance programmes rather than foreign patients.

The part a visitor does not get is written into statute. Ley 6 of 16 June 1987, as amended, gives Panamanians and foreigners resident in the national territory aged 55 for women and 60 for men, plus every retiree and pensioner of any age, a 20% discount on consultation fees in general medicine and in medical and surgical specialties, and 15% off the total bill for private hospital and clinic services where the beneficiary holds no hospitalisation insurance. The ages rose to 57 and 62 in 1995.

Inference — that provision is what separates this hub from San José or Medellín. Everywhere else in this directory the foreign patient is the one being priced for. Here the state has written a permanent discount for the resident retiree and left the week-long visitor paying list, so the same private ward holds two people paying different prices for the same night, and the one paying less is the one who lives here.

Trade practice — consultation, then treatment, over a few days to three weeks. Prices are quoted in US dollars, because the balboa is fixed to it and US notes circulate, which takes the exchange-rate argument out of a subject it usually runs through. The marks the hospitals lead with are American ones — a US academic affiliation and a US-derived accreditation — which is the recognisable-name trade this directory records everywhere from Gebze to Escazú. Follow-up after a visitor goes home is by message or video call.

As of 17 September 2026 Pacífica Salud states the Johns Hopkins Medicine International affiliation as current on its own credential page, with no end date and no year of renewal after 2017; this directory's Panama record carries no claim either way and none is made here. No Panama City price was read off any page for this record — a statement about the pages read, not about the world. The former hospitalpuntapacifica.com address redirects to a gambling host.