Article by Alston Balkcom
Your health care insurance policy will probably cover health expenses when you are on vacation. However, you may still want to purchase a trip insurance plan because it may offer benefits that your domestic medical insurance policy will not.
Most medical insurance plans will cover you for emergencies anywhere you might travel. Your cost share will probably be the same as it would be if you were in network even if you are not if you seek treatment during a health care emergency. The insurer doesn’t expect you to drive to the nearest network hospital when you have just broken a leg or had a stroke.
Medicare and some other domestic insurance policies will provide no coverage of any kind while outside the US. You should read your contract to make sure that coverage is provided in any country you might travel to.
Routine care is rarely covered well when you are overseas. Your policy may not provide any coverage for routine care when we do not use network physicians. This makes sense because you can usually control or schedule when you need routine care.
Most of us are able to schedule our vacations so that we won’t need any routine health care care while we are away from home. This is fortunate because when we seek to use a non-network provider for routine care, most insurance policies won’t cover it or won’t cover it well.
Some medical insurance plans will cover routine care when you use non-network providers with a higher cost share. It may not be covered at all. You will probably pay more for the care if it is covered.
If you have adequate medical insurance and are comfortable with the way it will pay if you have a health care emergency while out-of-network, you may not need to buy a separate travel insurance plan to have your health bills covered. There may be other reasons that you might want an international travel insurance plan however.
The travel company may have more experience dealing with claims from outside the US. They are likely to be more able to handle correspondence in other languages, for example.
International travel insurance plans will often have emergency evacuation coverage. This means that if you cannot get the care you need where you are, your contract may pay to fly you home so that you can get that care.
Travel insurance policies are usually very inexpensive. This makes the idea of dripping your regular insurance while your are on an overseas trip is a tempting idea.
However these plans should only be used as a temporary insurance that supplements your stateside coverage. Trying to save money by dropping your stateside medical insurance while you travel internationally could backfire on you.
When you come back home, your travel insurance policy will no longer cover you or will only cover you for a brief period after while you are in your home country. This means that In order to have health care insurance after you get home, you will need to apply again. There is no guarantee that your old insurer or any other company will accept you as an insured.
It is better to have a mediocre domestic health care insurance contract than it is to have a great international travel policy and potentially have no coverage when you get back home. For this reason, it is usually wise to keep your stateside medical insurance while your are on an overseas trip whether you purchase a trip plan or not. If you terminate your policy when you go overseas, the carrier may not have to to approve a policy for you when you end your trip.
About the Author
Quotes for international medical insurance plus Missouri group health insurance prices and information are available on the author Alston J. Balkcom’s site.
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