We are healthy people, and we’re Canadian. Still, we have money concerns relating to our health, especially now that we are traveling.
First, we have to pay out of pocket for daily medications. And while we expect to pay for routine trips to the dentist, we worry about how we might pay for catastrophic events like losing a leg to a propeller, or for treatment for a serious illness like cancer.
Our insurance broker said that some families operate on a shoestring and don’t buy any medical insurance at all. We are somewhat risk-averse and feel that we can’t afford to be that cavalier.
Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP)
Initially, we found it difficult to navigate the murky waters of insurance possibilities. We made lots of phone calls. We weighed premiums and deductibles of private medical plans against the likelihood that we would be covered for two years by OHIP. Perhaps, if someone got really sick, we could return home to be treated under our OHIP plan?
We should have visited a ServiceOntario office before we left for our trip.
A trip to ServiceOntario would have streamlined the application process for extended healthcare coverage. Instead, we had to fill in a form for all six of us while we were in the USA, which was further complicated by the fact that we were anchored out with sketchy Internet access.
Private medical insurance
Next, we researched our options for private medical insurance. Because of the scope of our trip — island hopping in the Caribbean — and the fact that we are Canadians (and not Americans), we were limited as to what companies we could consider for private medical insurance.
Comprehensive coverage
For comprehensive coverage, possible insurance contenders were:
These plans were expensive (to us) and might not cover pre-existing medical conditions.
Emergency expense reimbursement alternative
Our boat insurance broker, Offshore Risk Management, suggested an alternative to the comprehensive plans: LifeLine Emergency Expense Reimbursement. This plan will reimburse as much as $25K for any eligible emergency, from being towed to being called home for a family emergency.
I recommend contacting your boat insurance broker as your first step when considering global medical insurance.
Our broker said that he could have initiated the process with third-party insurance providers on our behalf. Instead, after going through the IMG application process, we opted for Offshore Risk Management’s no-fuss, cheaper alternative.
Note: This post reflects the insurance options and coverage available to our family in 2015. Policies, eligibility requirements and benefits may have changed.
Update: In 2023, a near-drowning experience provided a wake-up call to our insurance requirements. A link to this post appears below.
Related post
Very interesting post. Mary lost her balance stepping off a boat last week and broke both her ankle and her foot. We were just pondering how we would have handled the accident had it happened while cruising and where to find insurance for that kind of stuff.