There are thousands of people each year that travel around the world either for pleasure or for that of business. One of the worst things that can happen while traveling is that you fall ill or have an accident. The vacation can take a year to save for, but only a second to ruin. What’s worse, most insurance policies, both group and individual, provide little, if any, health coverage for expenses incurred outside of your home country.
The followings are some statistics that can show the fact more clearly:
• Half of U.S. travelers heading to another country will experience a health problem according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Most US Insurance Companies, such as HMO’s or Medicare do not provide adequate travel medical insurance, nor provide the necessary emergency medical evacuation, repatriation or trip cancellation coverage for international travel.
• Foreign visitors and new immigrants do not qualify for most domestic health insurance plans.
• International medical evacuation and air ambulance can cost over $90,000.
• The majority of airlines, cruise companies, and tour operators have huge penalties for changing the tickets and NO Refund policies.
Therefore, besides the routine medical preparation，you’d better find an adequate travel medical insurance. In the process of looking for the insurance you must notice that if the insurance covers all the countries you are going to. In a lot of cases, people fail to check to see whether their international travel medical insurance covers the countries that they are traveling to and come unstuck when it comes to claiming the money back. Before you take your travel, it is important to check that your international travel medical insurance covers all of the locations that you are visiting either by checking your insurance policy or picking up the phone and checking with your insurance company.
It is also essential that you be covered in places that you have a stop over. Here is an example, imaging stopping in Germany for a flight swap over so you can continue your journey to Spain. However, when you get off the plane, you fall ill and then once you are better, you find that your international travel medical insurance covered you for being ill in Spain but not in Germany.
