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Travel Health Insurance
Health insurance, hosptials, and other health concerns while traveling in Europe
Picture this. You're sick, or you hurt, in a foreign country and it's the middle of the night. Or it's a Sunday. Whatever the case, the pharmacies are largely closed, so you stumble into the front entrance to the nearest hospital. They take one look at you and whisk you off to an exam room...
Within a few minutes, there's a doctor in there with you, prodding and taking temps and asking questions. After a few minutes, he gives you some medications to take on the spot whilst he's busily scribbling out a prescription fro whatever it is you need to get better.
He gives you a few kind words of advice in broken English, smiles, and heads back out of the room while the nurse helps you to your feet, tells you how to find the nearest pharmacy that’s open 24 hours or on a Sunday, and she smiles, too. You leave the hospital, hail a taxi, and are on your way to the pharmacy and on the road to wellness.
At no point did someone ask to see your insurance card to prove you were worthy of receiving medical care. At most, you filled out a single form with your name and the word "tourist" under the "address" field.
Call me crazy, but socialized medicine is the greatest invention since sliced bread—heck, since the wheel—and we Americans are blind fools not to realize it. We have let ourselves become pathetically beholden to the thrall of big business and the daily incremental value of our 401K plans to see otherwise.
I've been to hospital in Europe at least five or six times, on my own behalf or accompanying friends of mine, and it has always gone down the way I described above. No fuss, no muss. Just a strict adherence to the Hippocratic Oath and a fast track to getting better.
Since much of Europe enjoys at least partially socialized medicine, you can generally just pop into a hospital like that and get taken care of. (Note that this may change. On New Year's Eve, 2003, Britain announced it would be charging non-residents up front for hospital care. This is an effort to crack down on "medical tourism" freeloaders—folks who travel to the UK just to get their major medical problems taken care of on the house, then return home. Unfortunately, these new measures—which have most British docs crying "foul!" since refusing treatment of any patient, British subject, UK resident, or otherwise, flies in the face of the Hippocratic Oath—may also make it harder for a tourist who happens to fall in on vacation to get treatment.)
Should you have a more serious problem requiring serious hospital care and maybe even coverage to get you flown back to the States for further care. In these cases, a personal health insurance plan can come in handy—but check with your provider, as some will cover you when you're on the road, and some will not, or at least will not cover the major expenses (those legal thieveries known as HMOs are the most heinous culprits in this department—though Medicare/Medicaid are also largely useless outside of the US).
For big, billable hospital stays, most care centers will bill you up front then leave it up to you and your insurance carrier to settle the costs. Blue Cross/Blue Shield is one of the exceptions (see below).
Finding trip insurance and trvael health insurance
The quickest, easiest, and most economical way to find insurance is to use the comparison shopping site
InsureMyTrip.com
(www.insuremytrip.com). You put in your trip details, it quickly shows you a side-by-side analysis of how much a policy would cost at each of 16 major travel insurers such as
Travel Guard
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This material was last updated June 2006. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998-2008 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
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