Travel insurance

Look at Medjet for evacuation.

I agree with Carol.....Medjet has the best evacuation policies.

You can get a discount if you are a member of AARP.

You can SEARCH for this in the SEARCH bar as this topic is brought up often. If you have access to USAA, they have great policies, with good medical evacuation. They use Travel Insured, which is one of the best companies on Better Business Bureau and many travel blogs/companies/etc.

If you're an AAA member, they use Allianz which is also a very good policy.

Just be sure you are comparing apples to apples when you look at policies. Medical Evacuation is crucial. Also, the better companies also cover lost/damaged luggage, travel delays, etc.

You guys are the best! Thank you for your info. I'm getting crosseyed looking at all the options. Plus, the insurance through ETIAS is cheaper. I would love to understand the process, considering why pay more than you have to, right? Maybe I'm picky? Shrug.

We used medjet for years till we aged out -- but of course having never had to use it can't say how great i tis. But evacuation is the biggest potential bankrupting event.

We get an annual policy. Note it is VERY important to make sure the policy you get covers the whole trip. Many annual policies (and most medicare policies) limit trip coverage to 60 days per trip. So be sure whatever you get covers the whole trip.

My view is that the only important thing is medical and medical evacuation. If you can afford the trip you can afford the loss -- but medical problems have unlimited unpredictable cost.

AirMed is like MedJet but doesn’t have the age out limit. We use them instead: https://airmed.com/Membership.aspx

We carry an annual plan from Allianz that is good for 90 days max per trip outside outside the USA. Also we have a Medjet Horizons plan to get us home. Our Medicare supplemental policy should partially reimburse us for emergency medical too. Allianz should get us to a local hospital. Medjet should get us to our hospital at home.

Thanks for all your solutions! Didn't know about the annual insurance for travel. Good idea.

Has anyone tried to do a bridge gap on their medicare supplementation? Our foreign travel emergency medical is good for 60 days, with a $250 deductible and our part would be a total of $10,000 out of $50,000 policy. So, wondering about just a 30 day policy? Then we'd use an annual airmed just so at any given point we don't age out. Looking at BlueGeo too for that gap. Will be making phone calls to find out more from differing programs. Allianz through our AAA only insures for 45 days.

Update: After way too many hours spent on this decision, we've selected IMG through Squaremouth. To help make a decision, I finally found information that gave an estimate of costs of care, hospital stays, https://wise.com/us/blog/healthcare-system-in-france We have coverage through our plan G Blue Shield gap insurance, yet that only covers 60 days. Not sure if we could have paid for a separate policy just for 30 days. Most people we asked was no, but that may have to do with just wanting to sell a 90 day policy. With this process, if you have questions feel free to ask as I might have the answer. BTW, medical evacuation from another country will usually max out at around $175k.

What, exactly, is the advantage of getting insurance within 15 days of signing up for a tour?

For many/most travel insurance policies you need to buy the policy within a short period (could be less than 15 days) after making the first payment for the trip if you want pre-existing conditions covered. A lot of folks don't want to risk the insurance company's definition of "pre-existing conditions".

Thanks Acraven. Very helpfull.

anyone over the age of 50 will have many many things disallowed due to pre-existing conditions. When I fell in a castle ruin and broke my elbow and required surgery, I had a lot of hassles about whether a pre-existing condition was involved -- I am thinking, 'yeah right, I got on a plane 5 weeks ago and flew to Russia with an elbow in 6 pieces and then waited till I got to the south of France to treat it.' What I was told is that some falls are caused by pre-existing conditions and thus would be excluded. Because I got the policy immediately when the first outlay for the trip was made, it was irrelevant.

I do not think you can use the 60 day trip covered by Medigap policies and then add a 30 day policy for the last 90 days of a longer trip. The policy wording basically indicates that for coverage to work, the entire trip has to be covered. Since the profit model for all insurance companies is 'deny coverage whenever possible' you don't want to make it easy for them to exclude uyou. I asked that question when buying insurance since our medigap covers 60 days and was told that the coverage would not work unless it covered the whole trip.

We now have an annual Allianz policy that covers 90 days as well as a medical evacuation policy. It is all very expensive at our age and we hope not to have to use them. The single trip coverage I had 6 years ago from Allianz worked very well so I hope their annual policy does as well.

One of my eye doctors mentioned cataracts to me years before I was aware I had that problem. I imagine that's a pretty common experience for folks around retirement age; they can be in "watch" mode for years until, sometimes fairly suddenly, they get bad enough that you can't read labels in museums. That happened to me in the middle of a trip to Europe (though I assumed at the time that I just needed new glasses). The situation wasn't bad enough that I needed to come home early, but I think that's the sort of thing for which a travel-insurance company would disallow a trip-interruption payout if you didn't have a pre-existing-condition waiver.

After cataract surgery it's pretty common for folks to need follow-up laser treatment. Having had cataract surgery itself is thus probably a pre-existing condition. I had to postpone a trip because I needed that laser treatment, but I had no non-refundable trip expenses (and no travel insurance to worry about).

And now I have osteoporosis, so I guess any broken bone would be suspect, too.