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Travel Insurance for Indonesia

Always travel with insurance. If you are a frequent or even occasional business traveler, make sure your secretary or your company's travel office knows this. Pay for it yourself if you have to, if it's not company policy anyway; and apply for a reimbursement; it will almost always be approved.

American health costs are the highest in the world, but medical care elsewhere is not necessarily much cheaper. A businessman in Hong Kong recently faced a US$45,000 bill for urgent bypass surgery after chest pain while visiting "only for a few days". A man whose wife fell into a boiling mud pool in New Zealand faced combined hospital, hotel accommodation (while she recuperated) and repatriation costs exceeding US$37,000. And a man who took his family to Bali for a weekend break was lucky that he was able to afford the US$25,000 to rush his son to the nearest center with neurosurgical facilities to evacuate a blood clot after a head injury; His stateside medical insurance covered him for the hospital costs in Singapore but did not pay for emergency aeromedical evacuation.

Always choose an insurance which covers emergency evacuation and repatriation to your country of origin, not only to the nearest place with "acceptable medical facilities"; what is acceptable to the insurer's medical advisers may be far from acceptable to the patient on the receiving end of those facilities. Few insurers are getting medical advice from doctors who have actually lived and worked in the country under discussion; for the most part, insurers' medical advisors live and work in well developed countries and themselves may have an underdeveloped sense of skepticism about the medical care on location and an overdeveloped sense of trust in reassurances from local colleagues. "Sounds good" is, to state the obvious, not the same as "is good".

It may be useful to ring the so-called 24-hour emergency number on your card before you leave - and make your call outside normal business hours. Find out if you can call collect; if the person you talk to on duty at that hour can authorize expenditure or has to wait for your policy to be validated, for 'higher authority' to come in the morning or after the weekend; and if the rules of your insurance restrict you to certain service providers or will disallow a claim unless the insurance company is notified first before expenses are incurred (a difficult problem in an emergency in a country with no reliable telecommunications).

Our appreciation to Dr. Rene de Jongh of International SOS, An AEA Company who has contributed this article in response to a need for information on travel insurance by expatriates in Indonesia.

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