Travel Insurance Requires Honest, Full Disclosure
Maybe it’s because travelers are feeling the economic pinch and are looking for ways to cut back on their costs without forgoing travel altogether. Maybe it’s the uncertainty about shifting currency values when traveling abroad. But in recent weeks I have heard from many travelers who are running into problems with insurers refusing to pay their claims because their medical applications were incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading.
I admit it may be tempting to look at an application and “forget” to check off a box or two if by doing so you might qualify for a lower price category. And since the non-checked box didn’t really represent a serious medical problem, what’s the harm?
Well I suppose there is no harm if you don’t run into a problem—which the great majority of travelers do not. But if there is a medical emergency and your insurer is called upon to pay your medical bills and finds that you misrepresented your medical history—willfully or not–you stand a good chance of having your claim denied. And it happens: a lot.
In appealing such cases, how often do I hear: “but I didn’t lie, I just thought that colonoscopy was not important as it didn’t turn up anything but a few polyps and a hemorrhoid or two,” or “my doctor never told me I had a heart murmur,” or “I only took the medication for three months and then the problem went away, so I saw no need to report it.” Not to over-dramatize, but these can be recipes for economic disaster because almost every travel insurance plan in the marketplace states that if you do not completely, accurately and truthfully answer every question in your medical application they have the right to void the policy outright, even if the symptom or condition you did not disclose had nothing to do with the emergency you are claiming for. Or, if the condition you failed to disclose can be related to your medical emergency as a pre-existing condition and the insurer did not know about it when you purchased your insurance, that too can result in a denial.
And this is not a trick. It’s not a gotcha. It’s not even unfair. Only a few years ago, if you ever had a pre-existing condition, even one that is now perfectly stable and controlled, it would not be covered, period. But holding to those marketing practices would have cut out an awful lot of people, so insurers have become more flexible, and now offer good coverage for travelers in less-than-perfect health, which means most of us. But in return, the insurer has to be able to count on the validity and integrity of the information in the medical application.
The bottom line is that if you have any questions about your own medical condition, or you don’t know the name of your medication or what it’s for, or you have any questions about why your doctor keeps asking you to revisit every three months, you better ask for a clear explanation, and if in doubt, have your doctor help with your application. You may have to pay, but better now than later. The responsibility for knowing your health status is yours.
Those applications may look daunting. And in my own estimation many of them are needlessly complicated and ask unrealistically difficult questions in formats that would frustrate a game show host. But until we can convince insurers to be more user-friendly with their applications and try using plain language, that’s what you will have to deal with: better up front than trying to fight a denied claim later.
