Travel insurance can be life-saving - just ask one Australian couple who might have had to pay $900,000 if they hadn't signed up for it.
Katie-Anne Salter and her partner Jacob Lanigan visited the U.S. last year to road trip from San Francisco to Yosemite for a hiking adventure. While driving to Yosemite, another car hit them head-on.
"A car (came) the other way, flying out of control," Lanigan said. "Both of us were screaming. There's just airbags in your face, broken glass everywhere."
While the driver in the other car was killed, the Australian couple survived but Salter had to be airlifted to the nearest trauma center. The vertebrae in her lower spine had "burst" into pieces.
"My L4 vertebrae had actually burst so it had burst so it had little parts of bone spread out," Salter said. "It was actually rubbing very close to my spinal nerve."
Salter had several surgeries, spent five days in ICU, and then was moved to a general ward where she had to stay for about a month to do rehabilitation and make sure she would be able to walk again.
After a month, the couple flew back to Australia, but not without a $900,000 insurance claim that thankfully her travel insurance, Cover-More, was able to take care of.
Had she not taken out travel insurance, she would have been in major financial trouble, as would most travelers to the United States which has some of the highest medical costs in the world.
"Kate's parent's flights were covered, the helicopter was covered, they said all my medical bills were covered, all Kate's medical bills were covered so we didn't need to worry about that at all," Lanigan said.
Cover-More Travel Insurance's group communications manager Maureen Mullins told news.com.au: "It is not unusual for claims to be this high for serious motor vehicle accident cases, especially in the United States."
"Kate required emergency surgery and lengthy hospitalisation to recover - cases of this type in the US can easily reach $1 million."
"The US health care system is complex and can be confusing for Australian travellers because it is so very different to our own. You're charged for everything," she explained. "Your medical bill will usually contain an itemised bill for every single treatment and item of medication you receive, even a simple headache tablet."
"It is a complicated system that ultimately serves a profit motive and one that is frightening for Australian travellers to try and navigate alone."
She further explained how foreign travelers to the U.S. are required to make a pre-payment at U.S. hospitals if they're not insured.
"If you are uninsured and you present at a hospital in the US for treatment, you are usually required to make a pre-payment, secured by a credit card, and each day you stay in hospital you will be under constant pressure to keep your account up to date," Mullins said.
"Uninsured patients may also be able to negotiate a 'self-pay' discount, however, these also vary from hospital to hospital and are not mandatory."
She added, "If an Australian traveler finds themselves, uninsured, in a US hospital, it could quickly evolve into a terrifying situation where they see their medical bills quickly start running in to the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars and their credit card limits and those of their fellow travelers start to be severely tested."
If Salter's experience shows us anything, it's that travel insurance is absolutely worth it.
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