Expatriate Health Insurance
When would you need expatriate health insurance? Insurance is equally important and needed in both conditions of whether you stay in the country or keep visiting outside of the country. In fact, when you travel outside of your country, you are more at risk then when you are in your country.
Also, owing to the highly developed business system and business organizations, a new breed of international business executives has taken shape, the members of which are stationed at any location for name sake only. Such people keep on traveling for almost 20 to 23 days in a month. In case of such an exhaustive travel itinerary in several countries which have different rules, laws and custom, traveling without any health insurance coverage is highly risky.
This is where expatriate health insurance comes in handy. If you are not covered under a group health plan, you must purchase a health policy for expatriates.
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Cost Of Expatriate Health Insurance
While calculating the premium for any expatriate health insurance, insurers consider facts such as age of the policy buyer, area/country of coverage, etc. Insurers do not consider your claim history to calculate the premium. Normally, based on the area/country of coverage, there are two types of plans: Worldwide coverage or Worldwide excluding the United States. United States would be excluded because health care is the most expensive in the US across the globe. On the other hand, few international health insurance companies have ranked different countries on various factors such as cost of coverage and calculate premium on the basis of the rank of the country.
Coverage Offered By Expatriate
Health Insurance
Most of the international health insurance plans for expatriate are, however, globally portable. This helps frequent travelers in moving easily from one country to other without a minute of no coverage. This is one of the major differences between local health insurance plans and expatriate health insurance plan and makes expatriate health plan more attractive for many people. But, these expatriate plan do not cover you when you are back to your country, which makes this plan especially suitable if you intend to go for a significant period of time.
On the other hand, if you are going abroad for a short period of time, travel health insurance would be more suitable and cheaper for you. This is because travel health insurance plans are not annual policies. These are offered for a specific and short duration of time and offer assistance during medical emergence in a foreign country. A key feature of most of these travel insurance plan is that they offer evacuation services and in case of emergency usually evacuate to the nearest location that offers a high level of medical attendance. Some of these international travel insurance policies also offer repatriation cost.
Therefore, before going out and purchasing any expatriate health insurance plan, check and compare how the policy will help you, if you need urgent medial attention, when in an alien country. This becomes even more important due to that fact that even today several countries do not have sufficient, adequate and standard medical facilities and may require immediate payment of services. Hence, the most important step in choosing any expatriate health insurance plan is to understand the assistance your policy will provide to locate suitable medical facilities.
Common International Insurance Exclusions
There are few fundamental risks that expatriate health plans do not cover. In other words, international health insurance plans, irrespective of the type of coverage offered, exclude certain specific fundamental risks which do not have any chance of recovery. Usually these fundamental risks are beyond control, some of which are:
- Acts of War.
- Hostilities, Military Actions, Terrorist Acts, and other Civil Commotions, whether war has been declared or not.
- Nuclear Explosions and resulting nuclear fallout.
- Contractual Liability - Liability of the insured which he has assumed under an agreement which normally would not have arisen.
Apart from the above, many plans have their own specific exclusions that may be very broad or narrow depending upon the type of policy or insurer that has issued the plan. However, all the exclusions are listed on the policy certificate. Therefore, before purchasing any expatriate health insurance plan, you must read the terms and conditions of the coverage and exclusions.
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