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Good Neighbor Travel Insurance Blog

Buying Health Insurance is Like Buying a Car

April 2, 2010 By : Doug Gulleson

Buying a health insurance plan is just like buying a car. All cars have four tires and an engine, and all health insurance plans have deductibles and some have coinsurance. What you have to ask yourself is how big or small a deductible you want to purchase. The smaller the deductible the higher the premium. Another way to say that is that the higher the deductible, the lower the premium. People who want to lower their health insurance premiums should consider increasing their deductibles.

Every type of health insurance, actually every type of insurance, is for catastrophic situations–“so I don’t lose my home, car, and shirt (and for me, my scuba gear!)” With this understanding, you will be able to find the best insurance “vehicle” for you.

A great definition of insurance is “a system to protect persons, groups, or businesses against the risks of financial loss by transferring the risks to a large group who agrees to share the financial losses in exchange for premium payments.”

Plans without copays have a variety of names to represent the same kind of plans: “HSA plans,” “no copay plans,” “high deductible plans,” and “catastrophic plans.” If you want leather seats, built-in GPS, and an Ipod holder in your car, you will be paying a higher price for the car.  The same goes with adding more benefits to your health insurance plan. You may want to add copays that will pay for doctor visits, prescriptions, urgent-care visits, and maternity coverage. Please realize adding all these extra benefits will mean a higher premium. If you do add copays to your insurance plan, the deductible and coinsurance will still go toward surgeries and procedures done in a hospital.

Doug Gulleson loves to scuba dive overseas. He makes sure he always takes his credit card AND international travel insurance. Visit Good Neighbor Insurance for your next overseas trip and get a FREE quote.

Doug Gulleson

Search Results

How Much Travel Insurance Do I Really Need?

August 20, 2010

Clicking the “buy insurance” button when buying an online ticket most likely will offer only very basic coverage. This may be fine if your trip doesn’t cost much and if your itinerary is not a complicated one. But if you have multiple stops over a longer period of time with expensive hotel reservations, you may want to consider Trip Cancellation insurance.

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Travel insurance is a must, as Hotchkiss School realized

February 27, 2017

Travel insurance is a must, as Hotchkiss School realized. Americans, in general, do not realize the importance of travel medical insurance when they leave the U.S.  This blog article is not just about ticks.  But also about the need to have travel medical insurance. Organizations must minimize their liability footprint when they send people overseas on […]

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Emergency medical evacuation benefit for overseas travel

September 30, 2014

Emergency Medical Evacuation includes medical due to outbreaks, epidemics, threat of natural disaster, even political evacuation due to civil unrest (treated separately), and emergency medical evacuation to the nearest qualified medical facility that can handle the medical condition. It includes expenses for reasonable transportation (either public transport or private as reasonable based on the condition) […]

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About On-site medical case management and evacuation – Hong Kong, China

June 6, 2012

Good Neighbor Insurance, Inc provides top-notch international travel insurance benefits that include medical evacuation.  You may view one of our best evacuation travel plans for those who are traveling and residing overseas for business that also covers security evacuation at www.onlineglobalhealthinsurance.com/global-rescue.asp.   We have a variety of other travel insurance plans that you may view at […]

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Understanding medical loss ratio (MLR)

November 16, 2011

Good Neighbor Insurance (www.gninsurance.com and www.gninsurance.com) is continuing to update our clients on the new health insurance laws.   There are six major coverage options for those in the US and even though some of the rules and regulations are similar for all many differences are there and it all depends on how old you are […]

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About Medical evacuation – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

July 18, 2012

Good Neighbor Insurance, Inc provides top-notch international travel insurance benefits that include medical evacuation. You may view one of our best evacuation travel plans at www.gninsurance.com and some of our other travel medical plans here at www.gninsurance.com/travel-A/international_travel_insurance.asp. All of our travel medical insurance plans have the very important travel insurance benefit of evacuation cover. Background […]

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