| - Informative Articles
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- Heading south
- Canadian snowbirds appear as ready as ever to migrate to the United States
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- “Well, I Didn’t Actually Read The Policy.”
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- Annual Trips Have Great Potential — But They Need Explaining
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- Early Birds Must Report Health Changes
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- Canadians Moving To U.S. Should First Establish Health Insurance
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- Symptoms Count When Defining Pre-existing Conditions
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- Short Term "Renewals" for Visitors Require Explanation
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- Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association Travel Advisory
| |  Short Term "Renewals" for Visitors Require Explanation- By Milan Korcok, Health Issues Writer
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- With summer coming on, more and more Canadians will be buying travel health insurance policies to cover parents or relatives visiting them for extended periods. Faced with the option of paying one month at a time for "renewals", or paying one lump sum for a six-month policy, the budget-conscious might prefer to go one step at a time.
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- If that's their choice, fine. But agents owe it to their clients to make sure they understand the risks of such decisions.
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- They must understand that by going month-to-month they are not really purchasing "renewals", but new policies each time. When a client buys a policy for one or two months, the terms of coverage end at that point, and the new policy is based on the client's condition at the time that policy is issued.
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- For example, when a Toronto man recently "renewed" a policy for his mother, who had broken her leg shortly after arriving from the U.K. - while she was covered by a one-month visitor's policy -, he assumed the "renewal" would cover her follow up care. After all, it was just an extension of her original policy, wasn't it?
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- Of course it wasn’t. Coverage of the broken leg continued only so long as the first policy did. In respect to the new policy, the broken leg was a pre-existing condition, excluded from any further coverage.
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- Had the son purchased a full six-month term of insurance for his mother, which was her anticipated length of stay, she would have had seamless coverage. She would have been secure the whole time.
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- Though short-term purchases may have been easier on the son's cash flow, they involved a loss of security he may not have been willing to give up had he known the potential consequences.
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- Article provided compliments of Trent Health. Author Milan Korcok is a freelance medical writer specializing in travel health issues. May not be reproduced or transmitted without permission.
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