Health Care on the Road: are you going to be able to get it out of the country?
If you are traveling to another country, health care can and should be a concern. You can visit some places like Canada and the UK that offer some of the best public health care policies of any place on earth, especially compared to rather tight-fisted and exclusive plans in places like the USA, where we have known friends who died due to a lack of urgent health care, because they didn’t have insurance or cash on them when they were in need. You certainly don’t want to run that kind of risk, and there are insurance companies that will offer you health coverage for travel, but you have to check the small print on their rules very carefully.
Some will arrange for you to be flown back home by an air ambulance, others will cover your hospital stay and surgery wherever you are, and some will do both. Others will say, “we will cover one trip to the doctor and one emergency room visit put that’s all.” The first thing to do before you travel is to contact the place you’re going, and find out how their health care system can help you if you are in need. For instance you may have no coverage in Guatemala, but the cost of a hospital visit is about 7 times less than what you might pay in the USA. Then again, the nation of Guatemala has 22 official hospitals, and only 4 of them have even simple X ray equipment. Many don’t have medicines.
Do your homework ahead of time, pack your own meds, and get whatever inoculations you need. Then travel and have a good safe trip.