MEdical Insurance

In 2013, my husband suffered a stroke and minor heart attack while onboard the Ruby Princess in the Mediterranean. He was removed from the ship when we docked in Naples. Here he was admitted to a fabulous private hospital where he stayed for 10 days before we flew home to Canada. He received excellent care and had a pacemaker inserted. Because we had travel insurance, we were reimbursed for almost all the costs. I paid the + $ 10,000 cost to the ship upfront. I also had to pay for new flight tickets. While both of these costs were reimbursed by the insurance company, without a high level on my credit card, I do not know how I would have covered them. The medical and hospital costs were billed directly to the insurance company, who did a great job of keeping us informed and ready to give any assistance we required.

I have wondered since that time, if we bought the insurance from the ship, if that would cover their own medical centre costs. IF so that would certainly relieve some of the financial stress. I would still carry our travel insurance coverage as we truly understand the value of that. While the agents we speak to on the phone are helpful and polite, I am not too sure we get the correct answers all the time. Who do you suggest I speak to about the medical centre costs for full disclosure. I believe I would carry ships insurance anyway, but it would be nice to know that it would cover the costs I am concerned about.

Does your travel insurance not cover the medical centre costs? Other than the fact that some cruise line insurance covers "cancel for any reason", I'm not sure why you would need both.

No. You still have to pay the bill, and then submit a claim to the insurance company.

In 2013, my husband suffered a stroke and minor heart attack while onboard the Ruby Princess in the Mediterranean. He was removed from the ship when we docked in Naples. Here he was admitted to a fabulous private hospital where he stayed for 10 days before we flew home to Canada. He received excellent care and had a pacemaker inserted. Because we had travel insurance, we were reimbursed for almost all the costs. I paid the + $ 10,000 cost to the ship upfront. I also had to pay for new flight tickets. While both of these costs were reimbursed by the insurance company, without a high level on my credit card, I do not know how I would have covered them. The medical and hospital costs were billed directly to the insurance company, who did a great job of keeping us informed and ready to give any assistance we required.

 

I have wondered since that time, if we bought the insurance from the ship, if that would cover their own medical centre costs. IF so that would certainly relieve some of the financial stress. I would still carry our travel insurance coverage as we truly understand the value of that. While the agents we speak to on the phone are helpful and polite, I am not too sure we get the correct answers all the time. Who do you suggest I speak to about the medical centre costs for full disclosure. I believe I would carry ships insurance anyway, but it would be nice to know that it would cover the costs I am concerned about.

There are some travel insurance policies that will "front the money" to the medical provider IF it is necessary for obtaining care (which might be the case if one's charge card limit wasn't high enough).

But I'm not sure how well - or how quickly - this would work with "all providers everywhere" in a dire emergency.

In one ER outside the USA, we saw signs stating that only a few specified travel insurance companies would be allowed to "guarantee" payment (upon verification), but that's different from actually paying immediately.

Our biggest likely expense would be medevac costs, and for that, we've got MedJetAssist, which makes the arrangements directly.

However, this does NOT cover any of the earlier medical costs (on ship or land), and one must already be admitted as an inpatient for this coverage to start.

We have high limits on our charge cards, and keep those in place for this reason, even though there are few other reasons we'd need such high limits.

But when we were "younger and just starting out", we certainly didn't have this amount of credit available.

(Has anyone actually been declined medical care overseas because the expected cost exceeded the total of all credit limits?)