Adding health travel benefit options to your group benefit plan doesn't happen without research, negotiation and expense for associated regulatory filings, underwriting, and actuarial costs and fees. But there's much more to this benefit option than meets the eye. Reinsurance, benefit communications, logistics, and claims payment details must all be sorted out and well-managed or beneficiary dissatisfaction, threats to safety, logistics foul-ups and unplanned costs can send all that effort and investment right out the window.                                                                

What's it all about?

Health travel (also called medical tourism, medical travel, health tourism, or global healthcare) is the practice of traveling outside a person’s home country for the purposes of receiving medical care. In general, the most common medical "tourists" travel to save money, to obtain services not available in their home town or to have minor elective procedures such as cosmetic procedures or spa treatments in conjunction with a restful vacation.

An increasing number of self-funded companies of all sizes including grocery chain Hanford, PepsiCo, Lowe's, Blue Ridge Paper, Serigraph, B&H Photo, and others, have implemented one or more health travel benefit options. While many do it to take advantage of price arbitrage on high cost medical procedures, there are several reasons why the trend is on the upswing. Other reasons include inaccessible specialty complex care nearby, delays in obtaining care, diagnosis or treatment (long waits for appointments or to access high tech diagnostics such as MRIs, PET Scans, etc.). One other reason could be that in work sites outside of the USA, certain treatments may be illegal to obtain under certain conditions, for example, unmarried women with an unplanned pregnancy, or employees who suffer gender dysphoria and seek gender reassignment procedures. In certain countries, an unmarried woman with a positive pregnancy test finds herself faced with police and arrest instead of compassion, and the availability of the pregnancy test we take for granted at the local convenience store doesn't exist, not to mention sometimes there are false positives and false negatives with those little test kits.  One discreet call to our Care Navigators™ will start the process to get these employees what they need, and the logistics coordination is all inclusive in your global PPO network fee access at no additional charge.