Health insurance and travel insurance are two of the most essential types of insurance you can have. These helpful policies ensure you’re protected if anything goes wrong. Understanding how they’re connected makes it even easier to plan for unexpected issues.
What Is Health Insurance?
Health insurance is one of the most common types of insurance in the United States. You pay a regular premium in exchange for getting help with healthcare costs. Depending on your insurer and your policy, your health insurance might fully cover all healthcare costs or it may require you to pay a portion of costs yourself.
Many health insurance policies have restrictions that regulate where and how you can get healthcare. It’s common for them to require you to only see providers within a certain network of doctors, or you might need a medical referral to see certain types of specialists for issues you have going on.
What Is Travel Insurance?
Travel insurance covers potential issues you encounter on a trip. Different policies can pay for things like lost luggage, foreign healthcare, or inconveniently canceled tickets. Typically, you get a reimbursement if something disrupts your initially planned vacation.
Travel insurance is often a shorter policy that is only active for a set amount of time. Some policies may cover the duration of a specific trip. Others might provide coverage for a set amount of time like two months or a year.
Understanding the Connection Between Health and Travel Insurance
Ultimately, these two types of insurance can have quite a bit of overlap. Though it’s not a requirement, most types of travel insurance will cover some healthcare costs for patients. Meanwhile, some types of healthcare insurance may cover costs for medical issues you receive while traveling.
Usually, travel insurance is meant to be a supplementary insurance that covers gaps in your health insurance. For example, if your health insurance only pays the full costs for surgeries in a specific network, your travel insurance can cover the cost of an emergency appendectomy when you’re halfway around the world.
Travel insurance also has the potential to cover expenses tangentially related to your healthcare. Consider a case where you go on a cruise ship and have a medical emergency. Your traditional healthcare insurance might not cover a helicopter taking you to the nearest hospital, but your travel insurance can.
There can also be some cases where both health insurance and travel insurance end up assisting you with your medical bills. If you are injured abroad but have a long recovery at home, you might end up using assistance from both your travel insurance and your health insurance companies. For example, your travel insurance might pay for your overseas hospitalization while your health insurance might pay for physical therapy back at home.
Sometimes it can be tricky to coordinate care and figure out which insurance company covers which medical expense. In more complex cases, you may want to consult with an insurance agent or lawyer who has experience with both types of insurance.