TRAVEL INSURANCE SCAMS

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This is a quick blog about travel insurance companies and the caution you must take in committing to any travel insurance purchase.

Japan, May, 2017 one of my tour members fell breaking her hip. she was rushed to a hospital in Kyoto and the nightmare began with her travel insurance company. The company she paid for the insurance outsourced it to another to execute the claim. It took 24 hours and an act of God to get them to provide the air ambulance she needed to return to the USA. At first they wanted her to pay the $130,000 to fly back. She had paid for a $1,000,000.00 policy for repatriation.

Not only was this woman incapable of handling the "but clauses" of this policy, but she was in pain from the injury, blurry in her thinking with the medication and in shock that this had happened to her (83 years old). The cultural experience of working with this hospital and the doctors and nurses is another story in itself. It was an education in the medical system of Japan. This is not a place you want to be to have a hip replacement by a doctor you do not know to do such surgery and count on the positive results of hip replacements. The frustrating cultural part of this was that the Japanese mean well, but there are times when you have to put aside tradition, ceremony and courtesy and deal with the issue staring at you as a human in a service as nurses and doctors.

The hospital never put her on an iv for rehydration and I was running down to the soda machine to continuously give her water. They supplied a mini amount in a tiny spouted cup that you could take two gulps from and it would be empty. The uncompasionate manner they used in moving her from bed to bed before finally settling her into a room 16 hours after the injury. She was screaming out with pain with their rough style of lifting and moving her. Later in the evening the nurse brought her in her dinner on a tray and left her. The shocking amazement is that the nurse did not even have the compassion or awareness to see she was flat on her back and could not sit up to eat her food. I had to ask the nurse to feed her!

The story gets worse. The impressions of incapability of the hospital and leaving her to have an operation in Japan, the insistence by her insurance company that they only medivac to the nearest hospital to do the operation, was incomprehensible. Why would you have a one million dollar policy if you could not be air evacuated back to your home? I had to return to work and leave this poor woman in a hospital where no one spoke English and her insurance company, who had a satellite office in Japan, sent no one to interpret for her. It was dire.

It took a week for her insurance company to get an air ambulance from Washington DC via Alaska, where it broke down for two days, to her. Once the plane and crew were in Kyoto, they had to rest before they could fly again to get her back to the USA for her operation.

LESSON LEARNED: READ your policy till you are bleary eyed and comprehend/perceive any way those words can be turned around for the good of the insurance company and the bad of the insured. Make sure who you buy your insurance from is the same company that would execute any issues or medivac once overseas. Understand even with that, the reality of what it takes to get that Learjet from the USA with American medical teams, rest time and then the return flight back from the other side of the world, via several stops for refueling, this is one adventure you want to know all the answers to before you travel.

This should in no way deter you from the adventures of travel, just be alert.

Katherine Whitley International Tour Manager

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