Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a ridiculous amount of gifs of random crap
And a dire need for an editor!
my first ever blog post attempt, I thought the gifs helped make up for my poor writing abilities
What travel insurance really means
111–120 of 186 posts
Re: What travel insurance really means
#112This approach by the company is not surprising at all. I have family in Canada who come and visit the US. They buy the insurance. One of them had a heart attach while in the US. Insurance paid something like $50,000 to put them on a private medical jet back to Canada. Far cheaper than having the care in the US.
I think what surprises me is that they wanted to fly the guy half way around the world. Canada and the US border each other. I DO think that the gentleman made a bad decision saying that he was intent on staying in-country for 6 months afterwards. That's probably all the insurance company needed to think, "Yeah, this guy is using travel insurance as regular insurance" Still, I do think the gentleman get the wrong end…
my insurance was for 18 months of travel though, so i intended to travel for 18 months. I think that's reasonable. Maybe my wording came out wrong in the post, I wasn't telling them, "no i wont come home" I was telling them I didn't have a return flight pre booked because I was planning on travelling for 6 more months yet.
Re: What travel insurance really means
#113I'm somewhat sympathetic to the insurance company here. Travel insurance is there to take care of emergency medical care. It's not for long term care. The guy clearly didn't want to travel because he preferred to be cared in Singapore. From his e-mail: >I intend to stay in Asia for some time yet. I did consider travelling home to have surgery in the UK, but the medical Service here is excellent and I'm already schedu…
Warning bells starting chiming as soon as I read how much the insurance cost. He might not have known better, but £273.70 for 18 months of insurance is at least 10x too low. My trick is simple: Get an Amex Platinum if you need insurance for under 2 weeks [1] and buy insurance from your bank for anything longer. Banks compete on trust, so they don't randomly fuck you over. I actually used my bank's health insurance wh…
That's a perfectly normal price for travel insurance in the UK. Because it doesn't include healthcare when you aren't travelling.
Re: What travel insurance really means
#114I always wonder when I buy insurance, if I need it will they actually pay out. You should be able to get insurance for your insurance. So when you need insurance and it doesn't pay out. Then that insurance company can go after the first one without having to resort to twitter or medium to shame them.
In Switzerland, it fairly common to have Legal Expenses Insurance, which might help you against your other insurance (e.g. homeowner's policies often include it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_expenses_insurance
Of course, whether THEY will pay out on a claim is a separate question.
Re: What travel insurance really means
#115The insurance company is likely not in the wrong here. I think part of the problem is that, as Brits, we are used to not worrying about this kind of thing. If we get hurt in the UK we get unlimited "free" healthcare (paid through taxes) and there are reciprocal agreements throughout Europe whereby healthcare is either free or has a nominal charge to reduce Moral Hazard. We don't have to think about communicating with…
You really should have health insurance when travelling around Europe. A friend of mine broke her arm and had a one night stay in a hospital in Germany. It came to €1000.
Her insurance were excellent and paid the hospital, in full, directly. The insurance company is STA - http://www.statravel.com/travel-insurance.htm
Re: What travel insurance really means
#116From his telling, the company was not very communicative when he contacted them, but, fundamentally, saying he should fly back to the UK for treatment and they'll cover the flight does not seem unreasonable. He complains that "unless you are injured so horrifically that you cannot survive another moment without life saving surgery, odds are they’ll just tell you to fly home and have the surgery for free." But, to me,…
His doctor said that he was not fit to fly back to the UK!
The incentive to say so is pretty clear: if he flies away, not only does the doctor lose a 15,000 costumer, he can also be liable if anything does go wrong.
Maybe he was indeed in no shape to fly, but he should have argued it properly in those days. Even now, it seems more like "it would have been awful to fly economy" and not "it would have been dangerous".
Re: What travel insurance really means
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
For large businesses that's a huge market, it's called re-insurance. State Farm buys a policy that (for example) protects itself against hurricane claims in the state of South Carolina for 2018 against a Reinsurance company.
Yeah but that's for the insurer. Getting "insurance insurance" would be for the customer, to protect getting screwed over by their original insurer, who has chosen the short-term option of rejecting a valid claim, but which results in long-term loss of trust in the entire industry. The only solution being...more insurance? Crazy.
I could see something like "If you need to make an insurance claim, we'll provide you a lawyer and/or other professional bureaucracy wranglers to push the claim on your behalf." I'm not sure of the exact best pricing model, but it could save the customer some serious money to have a professional involved in the claim, and arranging it ahead of time in case you need it seems reasonable. Probably this is just having a specialist firm on a specific retainer contract.
Re: What travel insurance really means
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
His doctor said that he was not fit to fly back to the UK!
The incentive to say so is pretty clear: if he flies away, not only does the doctor lose a 15,000 costumer, he can also be liable if anything does go wrong. Maybe he was indeed in no shape to fly, but he should have argued it properly in those days. Even now, it seems more like "it would have been awful to fly economy" and not "it would have been dangerous".
I only really comment on the economy seat because my cover included £2,000 of curtailment cover, but they weren't even giving me that. They were offering me a cheap seat out of goodwill. If I had accepted that, I was accepting that I had no claim.
Re: What travel insurance really means
#119I'm somewhat sympathetic to the insurance company here. Travel insurance is there to take care of emergency medical care. It's not for long term care. The guy clearly didn't want to travel because he preferred to be cared in Singapore. From his e-mail: >I intend to stay in Asia for some time yet. I did consider travelling home to have surgery in the UK, but the medical Service here is excellent and I'm already schedu…
I’d always assumed that “Travel Insurance” means you’re covered for whatever treatment you need in the country you happen to be in. (EDIT: providing the accident happens on your trip). Flying you home and palming you off onto the state seems kinda shady to me. That’s not really “medical cover”, it’s just a flight home. And to make matters worse they made out as if flying him home was doing him a favour. EDIT: Reading…
> Reading some of the other comments makes me think I’m just another mug who doesn’t read his insurance policies. But I still think that offering “£5,000,000 in medical cover” without qualifying that it really means "£5,000,000 in medical cover, only if we absolutely can't get you home and get the NHS to do it for free", borders on deliberately misleading.
I agree with your sentiment and believe this is just a shitty fly-by-night fake "insurance" company that collects premiums and dispenses plane tickets, but insurers aren't obligated to pay top dollar for whatever course of treatment you deem necessary without any opportunity for negotiation. If they're footing your bill, they get to have a say in the matter of when and how the job gets done.
He paid pennies for the "coverage." With that being the case and his being a British citizen, their treatment plan for everything is likely to fly patients back to the UK whenever possible. You don't become a billion-pound company charging 200 pounds at a time while also reimbursing first-world medical claims for travelers who aren't paralyzed in an ICU. I doubt they offer similar coverage to non-Brits for the same price, if at all.
We have similar plans wrt auto insurance in the US. You can either get proper insurance and pay a fair amount or the legal bare minimum for pennies, and when you get in your first at-fault accident you quickly learn what it is you have (or haven't) been paying for.
Re: What travel insurance really means
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's being willfully ignorant there. That quote comes from the section saying when an airline requires medical clearance. Two pages later there are several pages of specific medical conditions and guidance on if they should fly. One of them is "Full plaster cast" and it says that you can fly 2 days after getting one.
I felt that paragraph was the most relevant to me, I had been told by my DR that I shouldn't fly. They had already told me I was crazy to have flown to SG with my finger hanging off without being stitched up first. And I didn't have a plaster cast, they had given me a make shift thing in Bali, but once I reached SG I was unfit for flying home due to the risk of further damage to the hand. It was massively swollen and…
>I felt that paragraph was the most relevant to me
And not the one specifically dealing with broken bones?
>I wasn't going to ignore the advice of a DR who was holding my X-rays to appease an insurance company who doesn't give 2 shits about my health.
Which is not something anyone is going to argue about with you. Except, of course, those that have to write the $15K check. They are going to want more documentation that a one liner when standard medical advice says you can fly.