I confess this is not a question that entered my mind before last year. First, my husband and I rented an ATV on the Greek island of Antiparos—we are not remotely ATV people, but with no car and just 3 taxis on the island, it seemed an easy and maybe even fun way of getting around. Long story short, a steering column malfunction (it literally popped off!) caused us to crash into a stone wall and rocket through the air into the road. Then I was traveling through Central Mexico with my 78-year-old mother who, after an arduous and dusty trek into the mountains to reach one of the region’s Monarch butterfly sanctuaries, landed in the hospital with pneumonia.
In both cases we were all in the end more or less okay, and the medical expenses were fortunately not too high. But it did make me think of how easily the outcome could have been SO much worse—not just physically but financially.
When I started researching this question, I quickly discovered that medical insurance is covered under most umbrella travel insurance policies. Maybe you all know this already, but I didn’t! This opened a whole new Pandora’s box that I will have to decode for you in a separate post. (Upshot: from now on, I will be buying travel insurance for every major trip I take abroad!) But medical insurance can be purchased separately, and in some cases arguably should be, when the cost of nonrefundable deposits/reservations isn’t worth the price of insuring it. Here are a few of my takeaways….
Who should get medical travel insurance?
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