Travel Insurance

I thought I would do a post on insurance for others who are planning extended travel. Rich put a great deal of research into this, such an important one, healthcare is so expensive anywhere without coverage.

For Canadians, most of the insurance carriers need you to have provincial health coverage approval, for out of province travel, by the province you live in. Not having this, increases your premiums significantly.

An “Application for out of Province Coverage Certificate” is needed. Here is the link for the Newfoundland one as an example, each Province has their own.

http://www.health.gov.nl.ca/health/mcp/forms/oop_rqst.pdf

Take it to your nearest government office with evidence of why you will be out of the Province and need coverage. In our case I took Luca’s acceptance letter for school in Costa Rica.

The maximum you can get for out of province coverage, is one year.

Once approved, you get a letter and new cards that are to be used for the period of time you are away, in conjunction with your travel insurance provider. We went with Tugo, here is their link:

https://www.tugo.com/en/travel-insurance/canadians/

Everyone will be different in their insurance needs and Tugo gives you options, which effects your premiums depending on which options you choose. We liked that we could tailor make the coverage for us, and what we feel comfortable with risk wise.

Spending time in the USA increases your premiums for a lot of carriers. As we do not intend to go there, we could opt out of the US and get coverage for the rest of the world, this reduced our premium significantly.

We do have the option of contacting Tugo if we did want to go to the US and get coverage for that time only.

Tugo also, once we chose the options we wanted, came in about $1000 cheaper than the other carriers we looked at, so that too was a big factor in our decision to go with them.

This time next year we will need to look at our options again for insurance as will no longer be covered by Newfoundland provincial health insurance.

If at any point during the year we need to use the insurance, I will do a post and let you know how smoothly the process goes…