Saturday, January 3, 2009

Health Insurance for Travel

Being that Luke and I are no longer employed at WSU, we are also no longer eligible for awesome state health-care benefits through Group Health. If we were taking off around the world as young newlyweds we could probably skip health insurance, but since we are traveling with two young kids we decided to get some health insurance. Luke found a good policy through Blue Cross and Blue Shields called "InterM". Isn't that a cute name for insurance for people in limbo?

The purpose of the insurance is to tide you over between two life events. (The loss of one job and the start of another, the end of a career and the start of Medicare benefits, etc.). Because it is only an "interim" policy, you can only have it for up to six months. However, it is very affordable even at a family rate.

We will go ahead and purchase the insurance to cover the time we are abroad even though most of the countries we are visiting have free or subsidized health care, even for foreigners. We also have an international policy through Medex which is provided by Semester at Sea. Our US health insurance policy will be for a circumstance that would cause us to return to the US, in which case we would definately want to have some kind of insurance.

Ideally Luke will have a job by the end of the summer, just about the time our "InterM" policy would run out.

1 comment:

Eric Hensley said...

You might check out Lifewise of Washington if you don't get a job in six months. That's was Sara and I have and it was relatively affordable.

www.lifewisewa.com