What to Look for When Researching Health Insurance
Health Abroad » Health Insurance Abroad
Tue, October 06, 2009 - 6:19 am EET
When you move abroad one of the issues you may well come up against relatively early on is the fact that you’re likely to need health insurance cover. In the UK we’re covered by the NHS, we can call on it as and when we need it as long as we’re legal residents of Great Britain and have been for 6 months or more. However, every country in the world has different rules and few have the equivalent of the NHS.
If you’re fortunate enough to be moving in retirement to a country such as France that has a reciprocal agreement with the UK for free health care there are still issues and forms that you need to know about – and if you’re moving elsewhere or at a different stage in your life then you may very well discover that you need private health insurance.
As Brits, very few of us, our peers or our families have private health care cover, so in this report we’re going to show you what to look for when researching health insurance before you go and live abroad. All providers offer different incentives to lure you in, but which are essentials and which are just worthless add-ons designed to make you sign up?
It is not simply the case that in rich countries you can automatically have access to the best standards and methods of healthcare in the world, and that in poorer nations you will be at greater risk because standards of medicine are basic. However, many ‘first world’ nations’ politicians would have you believe that this is the case…
Some expats plan their relocation abroad meticulously and for months in advance, some are forced to do so as a result of having to go through a complex and lengthy visa application process, other expats just up sticks and land up abroad living in a new nation! But whichever way you go about ‘planning’ and arranging your relocation overseas, one thing that often gets overlooked is getting the most appropriate international health insurance policy in place.
