Travel medical insurance – no one wants to think about it, but it’s a crucial thing to consider before embarking on a vacation, and that includes a cruise. In a previous article, we wrote about how to prepare for a cruise trip, and one of the most important points made in this article concerns making medical arrangements before you leave. Some preparations are obvious, like making sure you bring your medications along with you, but others are less likely to occur to the average traveler. One such overlooked preparation is travel medical insurance.
Let us begin by pointing out that there is a difference between general travel insurance and travel medical insurance. The former takes a variety of forms and can cover any number of unforeseen obstacles you may encounter during your travels, like losing your luggage. General travel insurance may also cover not only problems you encounter while traveling, but also the complete dissolution of your trip, like if you need to cancel a vacation that you have already invested a lot in because of a last-minute emergency. Travel medical insurance, one the other hand, is exclusively concerned with possible medical expenses you may incur as you travel. Both are important to consider before leaving on a journey, but in the present article we are concerned only with travel insurance as it relates to your medical needs. (It should be noted, however, that some travel insurance packages include medical insurance, so if you are thinking about getting travel insurance for your trip, it’s worth considering plans that include medical insurance.)
Travel medical insurance is about one thing: coverage. So, the first thing you need to figure out is if your existing medial insurance (should you have it) provides any coverage for you while you are traveling. This is something that needs to be directly discussed with the insurance company because it can get complicated. For example, perhaps your insurance covers accidents that happen while you are on the cruise ship, but won’t cover medical services provided in a foreign country at port. (Not being insurance agents, we don’t know how plausible of a policy this is, but it indicates the type of questions you need to ask your insurance provider before you leave.) Coverage might also extend only to certain countries, and different rules with respect to payment might apply in different countries as well; for example, some countries may require up-front payment for services, meaning you would have to apply for reimbursement later.
After you have spoken with your insurance company and determined your level of coverage, it is time to decide if you need travel insurance, and if you do, you must determine what kind of coverage is most suited to your particular needs. There are minimal plans that don’t cost very much a month (some significantly less than a dollar a day), but, as one might expect, these have high deductibles and low coverage. There are also plans on the other end of the spectrum that have low deductibles and offer coverage of basically everything conceivable. Such plans can be well over $100 a month. Most people opt for a middle-of-the-road plan that offers reasonable coverage and requires modest deductibles. Whatever plan you arrive at, you should at least make sure you are covered against a medical crisis that would ruin you financially were you not covered by insurance.
You might think that travel medical insurance is for the overly cautious, and that it is a waste of money to prepare for something that is unlikely to happen. Of course, to say this would be to exactly misunderstand what insurance is all about: you purchase it with the hope of never using it, possessing it for the sole reason that something might happen that is unlikely to happen. How likely is it that you’ll need to be evacuated from a cruise ship by an emergency medical helicopter? Not very likely, but it can cost you up to $50,000 (or more) if this were to occur. It’s a classic cost-benefit analysis, and like many such analyses, it points toward prudent caution. And besides the catastrophic, there are any number of ailments that might befall you when traveling – certainly as many (and probably more) than when you are simply at home – so travel medical insurance is not for the timid, but for the wise.