This is a perfect story for our nelected Travel Blog -- I broke my ankle on a trip to NY a month ago, and had had the foresight (?dumb luck ? prescience ? paranoia ?) to add Travel Insurance to the expense of the trip. You see, I had had a bizarre mishap on my last trip to NY and ended up in a Brooklyn emergency room to get two stitches in my toe. For this my Anthem Blue Cross Insurance (catestrophic) was billed $2000 so the price got discounted to $800 and I got accepted for charity at the hospital so I've been paying off $400. Now this is what two stitches should cost, but I still wish I didn't have to pay it. So when I was ordering my tix to NY, I realized that if I had had Travel Insurance they would have paid for it, ostensibly :)
Enter Squaremouth.com, the Travel Insurance comparison site. Just go there, put in the costs of your trip, and sort the results by your most important benefit (lost or misplaced luggage, medical, flight delay, cost etc) and do a little research. I researched people's nightmare travel insurance battles (everyone shares their bad experiences online), and chose the cheapest insurance, which coincidentally, I couldn't find any complaints about (no one rants about their good experiences, that's why I'm blogging about it here). I hadn't heard of the insurance company, USI (Travel Insurance Services), but they had a AAA rating, and were based in No Cal, which I took as a good sign, as a diehard Leftie.
To cut to the chase, one week into a two week trip, I fractured and sprained my ankle, which simply twisted and turned under me, ouch! This sent me to a suburban NY ER, required crutches and a horribly designed big black walking boot, big painkillers, and ruined the second half of my trip. After all of the aforementioned had taken place, I called the Emergency contact number on my Travel Insurance and found the most sympathetic advisor imaginable, who said things like "we're here to take care of you" and promised to take care of all of the expenses connected with my injury, including rehab and a flight change to get home sooner so I could recuperate in my own home. Do you believe this?
This is what has transpired so far: Travel Guard (with an AIG email address, Chartis on the documents, and USI on my contract) arranged a new ticked for me go to home a couple of days earlier, in Business Class so my ankle would have room to relax, and sent me a car to take me to the airport, with an offer to have one pick my up at home which I declined. I have a sheaf of forms I need to add documentation to in order to have them pick up the medical and rehab bills, so tune back in to this space to see how it goes.
Regarding the Medical claims so far, I have a statement from the ER stating that the doctor's charges were $175. He sent me to an Orhopedist in the same building who has billed Anthem almost $1400 for looking at my Xray, telling me about my walking cast, and prescribing painkillers. This took about 15 minutes and has been billed as "Surgery" for $1200 in addition to an Office Visit for $166. The Boot cost $140 from someone else because the doctor couldn't fit me properly into the one in his office which would have been $50, and is priced similarly online. My fabulous Anthem Blue Cross membership entitles us to a big discount, so the orhopedist's bill gets discounted to $400, and the crutches in the ER cost $111, almost as much as the human contact with the ER Doc (they are about $20 online). So Blue Cross is making all of the profits from my Premium, and the people who provide the actual services have to bill at 3 or 4 times what they need to make in order to get paid, by someone, anyone, except not Blue Cross in this case. You know, Blue Cross, the ones who are having trouble figuring out how to make it look like 85% of our premiums go into medical costs, no wonder!
A note about the B&W photo above -- I lifted it off the internet and it's well worth checking out the work of the Street Photographer Markus Shartel for more.
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