Two recent events in my life have to lead me to remind everyone that when you travel:

Buy Good Travel

Health Insurance.

A friend’s mother who was in perfect health was going to visit friends overnight in Washington State. She accidentally tripped and fractured hip ending up in a multi-day hospital stay in the US without comprehensive health insurance. This touch of forgetfulness resulted in a huge cost (USD 20,000 a day) of the family. This issue could have happened to them anywhere in the world.

Remember that even in a single-payer healthcare doesn’t mean that healthcare is free it just means that the citizen of that country pay into the system if you’re outside of that system you’re still going to pay for your health care in that country.

I recently had to have emergency care that required three trips to the local ER, a travel ambulance from Sechelt to North Vancouver and emergency surgery on a holiday weekend, all of which was covered under our health care system. All of this could’ve happened at any time any where in the world, it was just when the kidney stone decided to become problematic.

So get a good coverage travel insurance. I purchase mine through Travel Masters in Sechelt, BC. They offer the Manulife World Travel Insurance.  I don’t purchase it online. I see someone who knows what kind of insurance I need to travel to where I am going. You can easily purchase insurance that doesn’t cover you properly. Since I go to Seattle a couple of times a year, I purchased mine for seven days of continuous travel a year at the estimated cost of $79 Canadian Dollars in 2017 for a normal healthy 40-year-old male.

You could easily bankrupt yourself your family. We are lucky to live in a country that has single payer health care. But we have to remember that we don’t have this coverage when we leave our beloved country.