I generally do not recommend travel insurance. In most cases, you'll be over-insured, and you'll be wasting your money. Travel insurance is best used when you have pre-paid and non-refundable expenses are it is more than you are willing to lose. For example, if you have medical concerns then it may make sense if you made a substantial financial investment in your trip. Even still, travel insurance has multiple exclusions for canceled trips, interrupted trips, lost bags, delayed trips, or medical expenses. Enough loopholes that they make it hard even to cover your trip at a reasonable cost. If you can afford to lose the money invested in your journey, skip the travel insurance.
Some credit cards also offer limited travel insurance for your bags, missed flights, or even car insurance for rental cars. A friend of mine had booked a trip with his partner, a few days before the trip his partner got very sick and was unable to travel due to a perforated bowel. They had no insurance, but they called the airline anyway and it turned out that they got the money back for their airplane tickets because they had bought their tickets with Mastercard and they had some travel insurance included in their purchases, which allowed them to receive a refund for the money spent on the trip.
Visa provides 30 days of coverage for a rental car (check your card agreement for specifics) and Mastercard offers 15 days. I have rented dozens of cars all over the world and have never had an accident or caused any damage until I got to Africa. I rented a car for a 30 day period, and it was broken into 3 times in South Africa, and the bumper fell off because of a large pothole in the ground. By the time I returned the car to rent another car, I got a fresh 30-day insurance coverage period on another credit card. The vehicle had 3 broken windows covered with duct tape and cardboard and a bumper that was being held on with zip ties. I was ready to see if this insurance really worked since I had
declined all of the coverage the rental car agency offered. And in fact it did, the rental car company charged me around $4000 for the damages to my credit card, but it was repaid to me by Visa at no cost to me. The collision damage waiver (CDW) insurance usually sold by rental car agencies would have cost me $45 a day or $1350 for the 30 days, and I had a rental car for 2 months so I would have spent $2700 on insurance plus the deductible that is usually high for the rental car. If you get the CDW, then it usually voids your visa insurance, so you can't have both. It's an excellent service that Visa and MasterCard offer, but it is best to call them and be familiar with how the coverage works.
Travel health insurance
Travel health insurance is different from travel insurance and it is highly recommended. If you're traveling within the USA or your home country, then it's not necessary since you have national health insurance (at least you should). However, if you travel outside your country, your health insurance policy will generally not cover you outside of your home country. In the USA this includes not being covered by
Medicare health insurance, which is the most commonly used government insurance in the country. Travel health insurance is generally more affordable than regular health insurance and offers much more coverage. Geo Blue travel insurance is an excellent resource: https://www.geobluetravelinsurance.com/product_overview.cfm. I've purchased their policies for myself and my parents when I travel, and I had found that they offer coverage just about anywhere on the planet and they are convenient to use and file claims with. For around $30 you can get coverage for yourself for a 2-week vacation, that's a fantastic deal considering the risks of incurring significant medical costs. Working in hospitals, I have encountered countless scenarios where I've seen a family destroyed financially due to an accident or illness while traveling abroad. Two particular stories I can remember was one where a young couple from Colorado went to Ecuador, and the young man got bit by a mosquito and got meningitis, he was treated in a hospital in Ecuador but possibly due to lack of resources at the hospital he ended up in a coma. His girlfriend started a gofundme.com page to try and raise the $50,000 necessary to fly him back to the States so he could be treated here with better medical care and have his costs covered by his insurance. Unfortunately, the process took a while, and he ended up in a permanent vegetative state due to the delays. Had they purchased travel health insurance he would have been seen at the best medical facilities there, then the insurance would have paid for him to get a medical transport plane back to the USA for treatment.
Another patient who was under my care, he was a 65-year-old male who had flown to Mexico with his wife for a two-week vacation in Guadalajara. Once he landed in Mexico, as he was walking off the plane, he had a massive stroke on the tarmac and fell to the ground with his bags in hand. The gentlemen had 10 grown children here in the USA, all with their own children. Everyone pitched in to pay dads medical bills so he would be treated at a quality medical facility and have a better chance of survival. According to the Mexican doctors he needed 3 months to become medically stable so that he could be transported back to the USA for treatment. At that point, the medivac plane cost the working class family members $50,000 to get their dad back to Los Angeles. Upon arrival at Los Angeles, the gentleman was brought to my acute rehabilitation unit for intense therapy. He made significant gains although he had sustained a lot of damage from the stroke. I could not help but think how much better he might have been had he been brought in 3 months earlier, as his family indicated that in Mexico he did not receive therapies as they primarily had him in bed while he was treated. The family shared their stories of financial hardship on all 10 children and even on the grandchildren who were able to pitch in. They said they had spent over $100,000 in the 3 months of medical treatment and transport back to the USA. This could have all been avoided if they had bought travel insurance for about $40.
The risk reward is too high to avoid not buying health insurance when you travel.
I talk more in-depth of travel issues in my Amazon Book. Check it out here.
No comments:
Post a Comment