Ensure you’re insured
Why it’s important to have travel insurance for most countries you visit.
Teenagers, as you’ll know, are morons. Poor decision after poor decision and when they travel it’s all YOLO to maximize others’ FOMO (those are still cool sayings, right?). Planning is for losers. And in my case, so was insurance. It was my first overseas jaunt; to exotic Surfer’s Paradise and after imbibing just a little too much duty-free I found myself bruised and bloodied at the bottom of the staircase of an Irish pub, having exited the establishment doing an accidental roly-poly .
Thankfully, emergency services were there but the Boys in Blue assumed I was in a fight and instead tackled me to the ground. Welcome to Queensland! From the back of the police car when they repeatedly asked if I wanted to be taken to the hospital all I could slur was : ‘‘I don’t have travel insurance’’. Like I said, teenagers are morons.
I didn’t need to have travel insurance or a fat wallet to have been taken to an Emergency Department. I could have recovered in a hospital bed instead of a wicker chair in a hotel lobby had I known that New Zealand has these wonderful things called reciprocal healthcare agreements with Australia and the UK, ensuring that New Zealanders receive free, short term accident and emergency healthcare.
In Australia, travellers qualify for medically necessary care. It must be care for illness or injury that can’t wait until you get home (such as tumbling down a flight of stairs) and care that Medicare, Australia’s publicly funded universal health care system, covers.
In the UK. the NHS picks up the tab for Kiwis needing medical attention when travelling there provided it’s ‘‘only treatment required promptly for a condition that arose after arrival into the UK or became, or but for treatment would have become, acutely exacerbated after such arrival.
‘‘Services such as the routine monitoring of chronic or pre-existing conditions are not included and free treatment should be limited to that which is urgent, in that it cannot wait until the patient can reasonably return home’’.
These agreements are great to know