Does your current health insurance cover medical coverage outside of the United States?
Even if you have health insurance and no special insurance coverage is required to enter your destination country, you may still need travel health insurance. Many traditional health insurances, including Basic Medicare plans, do not offer insurance outside of the US. Some Medicare supplements do include overseas coverage, but this can be limited.
“A lot of US travelers don’t know how much health insurance they have when they travel internationally,” said Stan Sandberg, co-founder of TravelInsurance.com. “You assume that health insurance will travel with you, but in many cases not.”
If you don’t have health insurance (travel or other) to cover you at your destination, you can expect to be billed thousands of dollars in the event of a health emergency.
During your travels, will you be particularly at risk due to a health condition or high-risk activity?
The CDC recommends travel health insurance for international travel, especially for those “in an existing state of health, traveling for more than six months, or engaging in adventure activities such as diving or hang-gliding”.
You can find travel health insurance policies that cover Preconditions, but you often need to buy one soon after paying for your trip (usually within two or three weeks). And some plans don’t cover medical care for injuries resulting from activities that are generally considered to be high risk. So if you want to be adventurous and like skydiving, make sure your plan works.
Do you need emergency evacuation protection?
Even if your health insurance includes patient transport, it may only cover the cost of travel to the nearest appropriate medical facility. For example, if you are seriously injured while on safari in South Africa, your airline may provide transportation to a Johannesburg hospital, but not the cost of the return flight home.
Some travel health insurance plans include an emergency home evacuation, and other companies like Medjet (MedJetAssist.com) and GlobalRescue.com sell stand-alone plans that provide the insurance coverage.
Choosing a travel health insurance
Travel health insurance is generally not very expensive. A policy for a 65-year-old traveling to Europe for two weeks could cost less than $ 35 for $ 50,000 in coverage, Sandberg says. Paying just a little more can bring you higher policy limits and extras like lost baggage cover. (In contrast, travel cancellation insurance is more expensive and costs up to 10 percent of the travel price. And insurance coverage that allows you to cancel for any reason is even higher.)
Shopping spree. Sandberg’s company has offerings from multiple plans, as do platforms like InsureMyTrip.com. These companies also sell cancellation insurance, but you can narrow your search for travel health insurance by entering $ 0 as the total cost of the trip.
And as mentioned above, you should consider whether a policy covers medical care for pre-existing conditions or for COVID-19 and whether it includes an emergency evacuation.
