One of my good friends has an opportunity to work on a client engagement in London, England, and started asking me about international medical insurance options for his ladyfriend. He will have medical insurance through his employer but his ladyfriend, if she chooses to live in England while he’s on this half-year engagement, will not have any medical insurance because they aren’t married and because she’ll have left her job. So, in chatting it up with him, the question of international medical insurance came up and he asked if I, in my infinite wisdom, could do a little research on his behalf and maybe write about it.

International medical insurance, or travel medical insurance, is pretty straightforward in terms of its offering and I was surprised at how cheap it was. The first step though is to see if you qualify for an ISIC Card because it gives you access to discounts and some supplemental insurance. Also, they recommend that you purchase travel insurance because it often includes some basic medical and accident coverage. If you are “a full-time student, a teacher or are under 26 years old,” then you’re eligible for the card.

Now, onto the insurance…

Abroad-Only Coverage vs. Both

Abroad-only coverage means that you only have medical insurance coverage outside the United States. The Both option refers to medical coverage in the United States and abroad. The advantage of Abroad-only coverage is in cost because medical services abroad are often cheaper and Abroad-only coverage doesn’t not let you return to the United States for treatment. The advantage of both Abroad and Domestic coverage is that you can always return to the US to receive treatment though the coverage will always be more expensive than abroad only. One significant disadvantage of Abroad-only coverage is that it will not cover pre-existing conditions.

Abroad-Only Insurance Providers

If you already have insurance, the best option is to talk to your provider to see if they offer international coverage. If they don’t (or if you just want to review your options, there are several international insurance providers that cater to the travel and study abroad demographic. If you want the “both” option, your best bet is to use an insurance search engine to get a few names of US insurers and call them up for more information.

Cultural Insurance Services International - This program covers study abroad candidates with affordable temporary health insurance. My friend will not be studying abroad, which is one of the requirements, but if you are, this is certainly a reputable site references by many universities. (Highway to Health, Inc. is another well-regarded student insurance provider)

Gateway Plans - This is a more comprehensive medical insurance provider that isn’t restricted to only students studying abroad. In fact, Gateway offers plans for US citizens traveling abroad, internationals traveling to the US, and almost everything else in between. For my friend traveling to the UK, she’ll likely want the Gateway International plan. The Gateway International plans will cover you for a minimum of 15 days to a maximum of 180, or six months. The plan rates seems pretty straightforward, with $100,000 of coverage for only $4 a day. (Wallach & Company, Inc. is another well-regarded insurance provider)

Does anyone have any first-hand experience dealing with travel medical insurance or something similar? I’m afraid I’ve never actually purchased any so my research is based solely on Google and numerous university study abroad websites, nothing beats first hand.

Who wouldn’t want to insure their life? It’s quite possibly one of the most valuable things I own and I would certainly like to be protected in the event I lose or misplace it right? Well, if you’ve gotten over the morbidity of the idea of buying life insurance and “shopped” around, you probably did exactly what I did - gotten thoroughly confused. What the heck is term life insurance and whole life insurance? What’s the difference between variable and universal? The worst part is that none of them are named in a way that makes it clear what exactly you’re getting. So, since one of my goals for 2008 was to figure out all these insurances and makes sure I’m covered, I’m forced to research it and try to decipher this complicated and likely very lucrative business.

Term Life Insurance

Term life insurance is claimed to be the easiest of the life insurances to understand and is named “term” because you are protected for a certain period of time - a term. The idea behind this insurance is that you can cover a small period of time with a lot of coverage and little cost. The idea is that you could use this insurance to protect yourself if you take on a large debt, such as a mortgage. For example, let’s say you just signed up for a 30 year mortgage and you are the sole source of income for your family. You could use term life insurance to cover the balance of the loan for a set period of time so that your family wouldn’t be in trouble if something were to happen to you.

Whole Life Insurance

Whole life insurance means coverage for your entire life, as long as you continue to pay the premiums on time. Sometimes you can convert a term life insurance policy into a whole life insurance policy, so that’s always an option if you want to. As for the premiums, this is where the companies try to get you in early so that the payments stay pretty level as you grow older. Since you are less riskier when you’re young, the earlier payments essentially offset your later payments as you become older and riskier. The other main difference is that there is a guaranteed cash value for the policy that you can actually borrow from. As you pay premiums, a portion of that goes into the guaranteed cash value bucket that is available to you if you decide to surrender the policy later. How much and how quickly that accrues depends on the type of policy you have and other factors.

Universal Life Insurance

Another name for this is Flexible Premium Adjustable Life Insurance (universal life just sounds better). This is a flexible version of whole life insurance where you get the savings element of whole life. The insurance company will invest your savings, offer a guaranteed minimum, and you get those funds tax deferred. What’s flexible is that there are two death benefit options. The first is that they pay out the policy’s cash value. The second option is that they pay out the face amount of the contract plus any cash value you accumulated. The first option is cheaper because the company pays out less insurance and the second is more expensive because they pay out more. I’ll be entirely honest, I don’t fully understand this and this article is designed as a brief overview.

Variable Life Insurance

This is also called Variable Appreciable Life Insurance and it is basically part life insurance and part investment account. The variable refers to the idea that you can specify a percentage of your premium to go towards a separate investment account that can appreciate (or depreciate). While some places will claim there’s a minimum, since it is partly an investment, it is governed by the SEC and you get a prospectus with the policy. What’s nice about it is that you can get tax-free appreciation, until you end the policy, and the appreciation can go towards your premiums. The risk is that there is always a risk when it comes to investing (as you probably are feeling if you’re currently in the market, this month has been brutal).

There are a ton more types of insurances out there but these are the big four categories and I believe I’ve gotten their basics correct. If any of you have any expertise in this, please add clarification or corrections in the comments.

The other day my fiancée received a letter from the Insurance Program Management office of Marsh Affinity Group Services, a service of Seabury & Smith, out of West Des Moines, IA. According to the letter, written by an Associate Benefit Specialist, Marsh had not received my fiancée’s premium payment for her AICHE-sponsored life insurance plan and her coverage was about to lapse. This letter would’ve been great… if my fiancée had AICHE-sponsored life insurance!

If I didn’t know better, or if she didn’t know better, she likely would’ve called the toll free number in the letter and asked to speak with Samuel Batterson to renew her life insurance policy if she was too busy to recall she didn’t actually have a policy with them. Is this a new style of fishing for clients or just a new style to us? I had seen this type of letter before in which webmasters were sent letters that looked like bills from Domain Registry of America in a scam to get them more business, but I’ve never seen it outside of that instance.

With so many different policies in our real lives, it’s easy to get confused as to which company holds which policy so it’s not entirely impossible for someone to get tricked by this. So, the lesson of the day is to be wary of these types of letters and do your homework. While it’s very likely my fiancée had some sort of AICHE policy while she was at school (and a member of AICHE), that’s a few years back so the coverage probably lapsed long ago anyway. Either way, when you get one of these just double check everything before calling (or sending a check!).

One of the things I’ve been looking at lately, given the upcoming wedding, was how to optimize our insurance policies because, as we all know, multi-policy discounts are one of the best ways to get a discount. Two auto insurance policies with one insurer generally costs less than two separate auto insurance policies with two different insurers. In actuality, only the medical and auto insurance policies can be optimized because you don’t really share any others. Anyway, I was taking a look at our options and here’s what I came up with.

Auto insurance
This one will probably yield the biggest savings. When you decide to combine two auto insurance policies onto one, you get savings because of two reasons: You are statistically less risky because you’re married and the multiple policy discount. When you do optimize your auto insurance, you should do more than just add coverage to your policy (or add coverage to your spouse’s policy). You should start the whole auto insurance purchasing process over again and get multiple quotes so that you can compare. Two of those quotes should be adding you to your spouse’s policy and you adding your spouse to your own policy.

Medical insurance
Theoretically, given no prior negative medical history, one of you will simply go on the other’s policy for some quick savings. For example, my fiancee right now gets free health insurance and would also get free insurance for me if she were to add me to her policy after we are married. That’s clearly the easiest way to go… but there is another option available. If she were to add me to her policy and I were to add her to my policy, we’d get double the coverage. How is this valuable? This is most valuable if you expect to use your insurance a lot because it increases your lifetime limits. In such a strategy, I would submit claims against my insurer first and if they exceeded the lifetime or annual limits, I’d start all over with her insurance plan. The same would work in the reverse.

Are there other insurance policies you can optimize after marriage? Those were the only two I could think of.

Image by Laineys Repertoire.

I hadn’t until I read about nonowner auto liabilities policies in a Baltimore Sun article this past weekend. Nonowner auto liability policies are for folks who don’t have cars but find themselves renting them often enough that having their own insurance is better than taking the one offered by rental companies. According to the Insurance Information Institute, it costs only about $200-$300 a year and is a better alternative than the often $20+ a day prices from rental companies. By comparison, my insurance through Geico, which only covers liability, costs me $605 a year for a 2003 Toyota Celica. Nonowner Auto Liability policies are liability only, which means they only cover damage to the other car and not your own. Luckily, if you rent the car with a credit card, your credit card might offer a collision benefit (which one reason why you should decline the insurance offered by the rental company and rent with a card that offers insurance).

A brief look at on the Geico website didn’t yield any information about nonowner auto liability policies and when I tried with Kanetix (an auto insurance search engine I used when I tried to figure out the relationship with personal information and insurance rates) it wouldn’t let me continue without putting in vehicle information. I think that if you want to take advantage of this you’ll probably have to call up the insurance company directly.

Has anyone heard of this before or know someone who has used it? Seems like a good idea for people who live in cities.

This week I went in for a routine dental visit to get my semi-annual cleaning and passed the checkup with flying colors. Today I saw the claim hit my dental benefits website and the disparity between the Fee Charged and the Fee Paid (that is the negotiated price the insurance company agreed to) was a lot larger than I ever expected. My out of pocket expense was a nice $0, as expected for my routine cleanings, and this was the first time I ever looked at my dental claim so I was surprised to see how much less the negotiated fee was compared to the fee charged. (% Diff was calculated as $ Diff divided by Fee Charged)

This was something my friend first pointed out to me whenever he had work done on his car after an accident, that the fee you would normally pay for service is generally higher than the fee you would pay if the insurance company pre-negotiated the fee, but I didn’t think the difference was this high. But, if nothing else, gives you ammunition (and a big of confidence) if you’ve ever considered negotiating fees with your doctor. If the insurance company can get a 48% discount, by haggling a little bit you should be able to knock off a little from the starting price.

The biggest surprise was the “Additional Intraoral Film” item. I accidentally swallowed when they took the first X-Ray so they had to take another X-Ray of my front teeth. To think that it would’ve been $21 to pay for it on my own and a mere $4 otherwise is pretty ridiculous, an 85% difference!

This is a double-whammy for anyone who want to self-insure themselves because not only do they have to pay out of pocket, they don’t pay insurance company negotiated rates, they pay rack rates (to use a hotel booking term). So, if you’re thinking about self-insuring, certainly keep that in mind (and the fact that you have much more leeway than you probably expect when it comes to negotiating the fee itself).

I had written a post in which I talked about some companies I love and one of them was GEICO, mostly because they were cheap, and bostonmichelle left the following comment:

You like Geico only because you’ve never had a claim or any other problem. Someone put in a fraudulent claim against me, and [Geico] just went ahead [and] paid them even after:

1. I submitted professional photos (at a claim shop) documenting the total lack of damage to my car.
2. I submitted my own photos of my car backed up against a truck of the exact same model of the claimant’s to show there was no way my little car could have damaged his huge truck’s back bumper, and
3. I spent 2 hours on the phone with various people there begging them to look at the photos and tell me how I possibly could have caused that damage.

So, they pay anyway, and my insurance record gets dinged cuz they did so. I had to pursue this case because there was NO WAY I was going to pay higher insurance because they are so stupid. After spending many hours talking with MANY stupid, lazy people at Geico, I finally get a guy whose wife had a fraudulent claim against her. HE got it and fixed my insurance record. It still showed they paid out, but I was now shown as “not at fault.”

Idiots. I’ve gotten the best deal and the best service of my life going through Costco (one of your other favorites). They use Ameriprise, which has been wonderful so far. Plus, you can pay your premiums with a credit card. I bet you could save even more money with them - plus you won’t risk your sanity, insurance record, or finances should you actually need to use your insurance.

I was pretty surprised to hear this mostly because insurance companies aren’t in the business of paying out a lot of money needlessly, they’re usually on the other extreme, looking for ways to get out of paying for something. So I asked for more details and bostonmichelle provided:

The claim they paid was about $450. It sure would have been cheaper to listen to their customer and not the claimant (they lost me as a client immediately, and I’ve been telling my story ever since), but I’m sure they had their reasons.

There was no police report since we both agreed at the time that there was no damage. I hit the guy while I was rolling from a standing stop - about 1 or 2 miles per hour. He had a dented bumper on his tall SUV, but my bumper (on my short little Sentra) was far too low to do that damage. I had hit his tow package hanging down below his bumper. We both agreed there was no damage. Neither of us had a camera in our cars.

He later sent me a quote for $700 or so from a repair shop. It listed his make & model, so I went to a dealer who let me park up right next to the back of the same model and take photos. I had clearly hit the tow package. If he had no tow package, the front of my car would have gone clear under his truck, which certainly might have damaged MY car -but not his.

I sent those pics in AND I went to Geico’s claim shop which put a measuring tape on the front of my car and took their own pics. There was absolutely no damage to my car at all. They sent those pics in. When I talked with the various Geico people, most didn’t have access to the pics. And, no one WITH access ever called me back.

The one guy who helped me knew what it was like to have a fraudulent claim. He didn’t see the photos either. He just had been through it himself and was sympathetic. I don’t know the insurance business, so I can’t answer your questions any more than that. You can post this email if you like. Anyone who wants to help share the pain of dealing with Geico on a claim is doing a good deed, that’s for sure.

By the way, I have NEVER had an accident - one that was my fault or someone else’s. And, I’m 36 and have my license for 20 years.

Again, I would get the hell out of there, if I were you. At least look into Costco’s service. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Basically it sounds like the person she hit pulled a fast one on Geico and they fell for it, leaving bostonmichelle holding the bag. While you can’t do anything after the fact, this is why it’s crucial to keep a camera nearby (nice if you have a cell phone camera) to take pictures at the scene of the accident in order to have some sort of proof. Your word is nice but evidence is nicer.