Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/09/travel-blogger-documents-his-n.html
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Please fix the extremely unfortunate typo as I have done.
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A few years back I worked at an insurance company as a nurse. My job was to rule out claims any way I could. I lasted six months because the job made me want to stab myself in the face.
Anyways, travel coverage? We had the most complicated rules for travel coverage. I always suspected in part, because if you failed at any one of a dozen weird details, we could deny your claim right the hell up. Yay insurance companies. . .
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You clearly have human empathy. There’s your problem. Not enough sociopaths to go around and fill all the corporate jobs that require them. Shame on Donald Trump for hogging them for cabinet positions.
I remember that the “non profit” Blue Cross / Blue Shield had a rescission department. The company didn’t care if you qualified or not when you were just paying, but if you had an expensive condition they would immediately start looking for flimsy excuses to retroactively dump your ass from coverage (but still keep the money you paid, of course). They finally got fined 2 whole million dollars for this after dropping thousands of patients with expensive conditions - which I’m sure scared the company so bad they could barely even remember how cheap the fine was compared to the amount of profit they made from the practice. 
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Have you read Something Positive?
It’s a dark webcomic, based largely on the author’s experiences, and for the first few years, the main character had a very similar job.
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We had one of those departments. We called it “Case Management”. They would “help” you by trying to constantly downgrade you to less expensive care, and “graduate” you off of case management. The bottom line was always the dollar.
When I first got hired, I had to process hundreds and hundreds of labs according to the codes. Not all of them were right, for whatever reason the lab had sent it in miscoded. My job was to go through hundreds of these, and bounce the bad ones. We knew, all of us, that the lab was legit, just miscoded, but we bounced it as not a covered service first, and most folks just paid the lab out of pocket then.
My being a super fast data processor ended up getting my boss a bonus for saving the company money. It was enough she had a large downpayment for a new Jetta. I decided to quite after that.
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I’ve seen that. It’s pretty accurate.
We had an annual policy from Alliance that we purchased after a friend who had the same policy had a stroke while on a river cruise in France. Insurance covered his hospital, wife’s hotel, transport and meals until he could fly, and provided a nurse to travel home to California. The cost for an annual policy was about the same as single-trip coverage, but had fewer limitations. We had three trips planned for 2016 that were covered. If I travel overseas again I’ll buy the same policy.
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I’m glad it worked out for him, but I sort of hate it when companies acquiesce to social media barrages.Not everyone has got a huge number of twitter followers to back them up. And while I know that if I needed it, you guys would come to my assistance, I somehow don’t think 20 angry boingboing regulars would sway whatever company was trying to give me the shaft.
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Several years ago I had Medex travel Insurance while here in Peru. A few hours before I was scheduled to return home a kidney stone dropped me in total misery. Medex was called and immediately made arrangements for the best hospital in Iquitos at the time. (They had the cleanest lizards running around on the walls) Test were done confirming the obvious and when My stateside carrier said they would not pay for surgery here in Peru Medex flew in a nurse who got me in a first class seat complete with an IV drip hung off the overhead bin. In Miami I was transferred by ambulance to a hospital where My stateside insurance paid for the stone removal. I really remember very little from the time I got to the hospital in Miami except when I was coming around in a lithotripsy tank…tub …whatever that had some little floating rubber duckys. Despite bawling like a baby they would not let me keep even one of those damn ducks.I have made dozens more trips to Peru and I currently here again. Thankfully I’ve never needed to use Medex again But I have never traveled without their coverage. They were great.
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