Healthy options

If you are living or working abroad, you will need to consider health insurance for you and your family. Many international health insurance packages are available – but how to choose the right one? By Tim Hyam

Warning! Finding the right international medical insurance can have unpleasant side effects. With more than a dozen different companies offering international health cover and each providing two or three different policies, looking through them all for the right coverage at the right price can cause headache and queasiness and in some cases you may feel the need to lie down.

But painful as the process can be, finding international health insurance is essential for most expats. State-funded healthcare is not an automatic right in many countries, and where it is it may provide only the minimum level of treatment. However, paying for private medical care without insurance is likely to be too costly for most expats to consider.

Fortunately, the painful side effects of choosing the right international health insurance are avoidable. To begin with, when you are selecting your medical insurance you should look beyond the premiums you will have to pay – the cheapest policy is not necessarily the best for you. Paul Andrews, business development manager at health insurer William Russell, says: “A lot of people look for the cheapest premium and only realize later that the policy is not as comprehensive as they require.”

Rather than just looking for the cheapest premium, make sure you are covered for everything you need – always read the small print to check how comprehensive your cover really is. Many expats like to play sport as a way of socialising but if they are injured they can find they are not covered for treatment for sports injuries. Also, will your cover include evacuation to another country? This is particularly important in countries where the healthcare system is less developed – the treatment you require may not be available locally and you would need to be airlifted to another country. This can be extremely costly if you are not covered.

Look at the offered benefits of each policy. Note that 85% of claims made to international insurance companies are for out-patient related care, according to broker PHA. But most international insurance covers in-patient treatment and sets limits on out-patient cover.

The cost of the insurance will go down if you exclude cover for chronic illnesses – those that persist for a long time without cure, as opposed to acute illnesses, which may be cured and present no further trouble. But excluding chronic illnesses from your cover may be risky. For example, if you were struck by cancer, it may at first be treated as an acute illness, with hope of a cure. But later it may prove to be chronic, and if you were not covered for chronic illness then the cover would be withdrawn.

Also note that you can choose what level of excess to have on your insurance – the level up to which you will pay for your medical treatment yourself. The higher you set your excess level, the lower your insurance premiums will be.

Try to assess the overall service you will receive if you need to make a claim. If you fall ill thousands of miles from home, you will want an insurance company that you can get hold of quickly and that will settle your claim promptly. Recommendations from friends or colleagues can be very useful in this regard, or you can ask for advice from an independent health insurance broker.

What country or region you live in can make a big difference to your healthcare policy. There are three main areas for insurance purposes: Europe, which is the cheapest for health insurance; worldwide excluding US and Canada; and worldwide including US and Canada (the most expensive).

It is worth checking that your cover is portable across different countries. If you are living in Hong Kong, you might want your health insurance to cover you for a business trip to Thailand, for example. Also, many expats find it useful to be covered for return trips to the UK. It is quite common for expats to postpone non-urgent operations until they return to the UK for a few weeks, not least because they like to have their extended family close at hand when they are hospital.

To take some of the pain out of comparing health insurance policies, Investment International has teamed up with insurance broker Medibroker to provide this table to help you decide on the best international medical insurance for your needs.