Medical Evacuation: Reputable Company Discovery

I know nothing about the company you mention. But you might want to consider this: any insurance policy that will medivac you home at your discretion, without an objective assessment of medical necessity, has to be a lot more expensive than one that doesn't. Think about it--medical evacuation is a highly expensive service. The thing that keeps insurance rates affordable is that, while expensive, it is rarely needed. Most medical issues can be dealt with where they happen, and most travelers with medical issues can get home on a normally scheduled flight. Only in very unusual cases will medivac services be needed. But, if the traveler can decide unilaterally that he prefers to be evacuated for treatment at home--even when a doctor's assessment is that it isn't medically necessary--the number of those evacuations will be much, much higher than if only medically necessary evacuations are covered. That means that the insurance company's risks become higher and they will have to charge a much higher premium to cover the risks.

So, unless the premiums are much, much higher than typical for the company, one of these things is likely to be true: they don't really allow covered evacuation at your discretion, or there are other loopholes that keep them from paying out on evacuations, or they are a fly by night company that expects to collect premiums but not to pay out claims. Or, like the RAC, they have a very large base of other insurance that is subsidizing the medivac coverage.

The same question is running under the Italy section with more answers but they are all the same. Might check there before responding here. I am guessing that he was hoping for better answers here.

I actually do run with the bulls in Pamplona. I have done so every year since 1976. I have been hurt, but never to the extent where an air ambulance would have been required. I also tour in the middle east (Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey) on my faithful BMW motorcycle.

The AirMed policy that I am wondering about is similar to the offered by MedJet Assist. It does hospital-to-hospital transfers at my option. The hospital-to-hospital transfer is how they do their need screening. They claim, on their website, to have done medical evacuations from a lot of places in the world. As with Sherry's MedJet Assist, they claim to do flights within North America, for example, for skiing injuries that occur some distance away.

Their policy appears to be reasonable enough. I need a specific way to figure out if they are reputable.

(I know that I double posted, it was accidental, I meant to post to "Transportation," but accidentally posted to Italy, now I do not know how to merge them.)

Regarding the company AirMed, first you ought to find out where they are registered (if they are registered) in Canada, the U.S., just in some states or countries or all of Canada or the U.S. or elsewhere. Then contact the insurance commissioner or whoever is overseeing insurance companies (if there is someone) in the respective location and inquire about the status of AirMed. If they're actually legit, have there been any complaints or law suits etc. Have you talked to AirMed regarding their practices and policies and their credentials? Most insurance companies, I believe, will insist on a medical necessity evacuation, because there may be considerable cost connected with it, like tens of thousands of dollars.

The U.S. State Department maintains a list of companies that provide medical evacuation & services.

You can see the list here:

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1470.html#companies

I think you could pretty safely assume that the companies on the list are reputable.

JER hit the nail on the head. I can't think of an insurance company that will be willing to insure an individual's medical evacuation that isn't based on a physician's directive.

And honestly, I don't know your personal criteria for medical evacuation, but it seems to me that if I were hurt badly enough to want to be evacuated back to the States, it would take a level of damage that most physicians would approve anyway. Knock on wood, of course.

Don't forget that AirMed requires that you not be able to "travel by commercial means, such as an airplane, cruise ship or rental car" before they will evacuate you. It'd be interesting to know what guidelines they use to assess that. It's been my experience that Canadian insurance policies with air evacuation (which most seem to have) are pretty anxious to evacuate you to your home province as soon as you are stable, so they can put the cost of your continued care under the provincial health care system, rather than continuing to pay for it out of their own pockets.

And, reasonably speaking, if you are in a first category northern European hospital, evacuation would almost never be actually necessary; their standard of care is as good as North American care. You can get treated there.

While evacuation coverage can be used to fly you to the US for proper treatment (especially from third-world countries), it's more typically used to get back home to recuperate from treatment received overseas. For example, if you suffered a severe leg/hip break and needed to remain immobile after the bones were set, no hospital in the world is going to allow you to take up a hospital bed for several weeks until the bones mend. For practicality and overall comfort of the patient most all doctors would sign-off on evacuation back home. Thus, the insurance company would have to arrange and pay for transport back home to recuperate.

I found this thread through a Google alert that I get daily, and yes, I work for AirMed, the company you are asking about. AirMed's founder and CEO actually also founded MedJet in the early 1990s. Both companies are based in Alabama and both are licensed in Canada and the U.S.

The U.S. State Department link that another user posted has been slow to correct our listing on that page, as it still lists us as "MedJet International" (Until 2003, AirMed Int'l was known as "MedJet International"..it is our phone number on that travel.gov listing. As you can see, we changed our name to lessen confusion because it was pretty rampant :)

Since there is no governing body over air ambulance companies in North America(helicopter or fixed-wing), reputable companies go through a voluntary accreditation process which speaks volumes for a program's credibility, safety practices and medical expertise. So I encourage you to look at accredited air ambulance programs through the CAMTS website (Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Systems) www.camts.org

I hope this was helpful. You can discover more about AirMed International on our website, especially on this page, http://www.airmed.com/in-the-news/fact-sheet.cfm. I apologize for sounding like a commercial, but I do love to help people discover more about my company.

I appreciate all of the comments that have been posted to this thread. I posted here because Rick talked about the possibility of an expensive evacuation on his last radio program. He suggested insurance, but was not specific.

The problem with a policy that depends on “medical necessity” is who determines if it is necessary? A functionary of the insurance company would have every motivation to turn you down. Independent physicians might be ignored. As “medical necessity” evacuation policies are cheap (about $35), it would seem that they do not take many people back.

And, reasonably speaking, if you are in a first category northern European hospital, evacuation would almost never be actually necessary; their standard of care is as good as North American care. You can get treated there. However, a patient facing surgery or a significantly long stay might well prefer to go home, if only for social reasons; or, for treatment by particular practitioners.

In some places, such as Spain, few hospital caregivers speak English, which might be depressing. (It was for me, my hospital was highly qualified, they do heart transplants. I was there for broken ribs and a concussion; I was well treated; however, my poor Spanish was isolating.)

Moving out of Europe, things get more problematical. I was again motorcycling in Eastern Turkey and Syria this year. (Iran last year) These are wonderful countries to visit independently, using your own vehicle, especially Syria that gets few tourists. However, road traffic is somewhat chaotic. And on the roads there are more than vehicles; often walkers and sometimes even animal herds (sheep, goats) use the roads. Anyhow, road accidents can happen anywhere. I suspect that, as a matter of pride, officials there would insist that medical care was adequate. If the “medical necessity” determiner is local, it is hard to believe that they would often determine that evacuation was necessary.

I bought a one-year MedJet Assist membership in 2008 and again this year for my last 2 trips to Europe. It costs about $230 (I'm 29 and was a student in 2008 but not in 2010, and the price didn't change) for a year. Once you can leave the hospital, MedJet will fly you home if you're more than 200 miles from home.

Lawrence....I must be missing something here.
Do you carry supplemental health insurance with you when you travel? Or are you insured for out of country medical expenses through your employer? Most of the policies you can get here in Canada include evacuation insurance. And, as I said earlier, it would be the insurance company's medical advisors who would determine whether you are to be transferred. As I also said earlier, it has been my experience that they want to see you transferred as soon as possible, so that the costs for your care are picked up by OHIP at the earliest possible opportunity so that it pays for your care, not the insurance company.
You also have to be pretty badly hurt or sick to qualify even for AirMed to evacuate you. Despite their promises, they're pretty clear that they will only fly you out if you cannot travel by plane, train, or automobile. I doubt very much if a couple of broken ribs and a concussion would qualify.

Lawrence, I think your own posts answer why no reputable insurance company would authorize medivac services based not on medical necessity but on patient preferences. You say you were in a Spanish hospital for a concussion and broken ribs, and that the quality of medical care was fine, but your lack of Spanish language ability was "isolating" and "depressing," in your words. If patients could unilaterally impose tens of thousands of dollars of claim on their insurance for medically unnecessary medivac services on the basis of their desire for a more cheerful social environment while laid up, that's an insurance company that's going to be racking up frequent hefty claims. Premiums for that kind of policy have to be sky high or the company will go out of business. Sorry, but that's the brutal economic truth.