As a luxury travel advisor based in Los Angeles, there’s one thing I insist on with every single international trip I book, and that’s comprehensive travel insurance. I’ve had clients push back on it before, because it feels like an extra cost tacked onto a trip that’s already expensive, and nobody really wants to think about what could go wrong before they’ve even packed their bags.
Then a trip like this one happens, and I’m reminded all over again why I never stop asking.
A family of seven flew to Italy for what was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime, with Rome and a day trip to Pisa on the itinerary and all the memories they imagined making together along the way. The parents were older and more vulnerable to health issues than the rest of the family, which made travel insurance an easy recommendation on my end, but they declined it anyway.
During the excursion to Pisa, the father fell while climbing a set of stairs and was seriously injured, and in an instant, a carefully planned family vacation turned into a medical emergency. He had to be evacuated back to Rome for hospitalization, and everything after that unraveled. Because there was no insurance behind them, the family paid out of pocket for emergency care in Pisa and transportation to the hospital in Rome, on top of last minute changes to their travel plans. They lost the money on prepaid excursions they never got to use, and since their original tickets couldn’t be changed, they ended up buying an entirely new set of flights home for all seven of them.
What started as a long-awaited family trip became a financial and emotional ordeal, and instead of the vacation they had planned, they spent the rest of it dealing with hospitals, logistics, and mounting bills far from home.
Stories like this are exactly why I asked my friend Andre Plessis to weigh in. Andre works in insurance and has his own firsthand experience with what happens when something goes wrong overseas, and I wanted his perspective for anyone who is on the fence about coverage the way that clients were.
Andre’s Story: Why I Will Never Travel Without Insurance Again
A few years ago I traveled to France and made one mistake I will never make again, which was not purchasing travel insurance before I left.
While I was visiting Lac Saint-Ferreol, walking around the lake and taking in the scenery, I stepped into a muddy patch, my foot slipped, and I went down hard enough to break my ankle. The pain hit immediately, and I was taken to the hospital, where the doctors told me I would need surgery to repair it, inserting a metal plate and several screws to hold everything together.
Before the surgery could happen, though, I ran into a problem I never saw coming. A member of the hospital staff explained that they weren’t sure they could perform the operation, because they had been burned before by foreign patients who never paid their bills once they were back home. I told her I would personally cover the cost if it came to that, and she asked me to wait while the hospital made its final decision. Those minutes felt endless, but she eventually came back and told me they had agreed to move forward. In the end, the surgery itself only took about twenty minutes, even though I had waited nearly ten hours in that hospital before I was finally wheeled into the operating room.
After I was discharged, a nurse came to my home every day for a week, cleaning the wound, checking on my recovery, and giving me a daily injection, and by the end of that week I asked what I owed her for all of it. The total came to seventy euros, which I genuinely could not believe, so I handed her a hundred euros in cash just to say thank you properly. I also stopped at a local pharmacy for my prescribed medications and supplies, which came to around three hundred fifty euros.
About four months after I got home, the hospital finally sent the invoice, and I braced myself for something enormous. Instead it came to twenty seven hundred euros, roughly three thousand two hundred dollars at the time, which I paid right away with my credit card. Considering that the same surgery in the United States could easily run into the tens of thousands, I actually felt lucky, at least until the real headache started.
I had U.S. health insurance with a thirty percent coinsurance on covered services, so I expected a meaningful reimbursement once I filed my claim. I sent every document they asked for, the hospital invoice, proof of payment, medical records, surgical reports, all of it, and then I waited. When I finally called to check in, I was told they still needed documents I had already submitted, and this happened over and over, with a new letter requesting the same proof every few days and a different representative on every call who needed the entire story explained to them again from scratch.
Nearly two months later, I received a reimbursement of about two thousand dollars, but my out of pocket total still came to roughly twelve hundred dollars for the surgery alone, on top of the medications and the cash I had paid the nurse, none of which were ever reimbursed. That’s when I learned something I hadn’t known before all of this happened, which is that most U.S. health plans don’t reimburse prescriptions bought abroad, and they generally won’t reimburse cash payments made overseas either.
Looking back, the money was never really the hardest part of any of it. What wore on me most was the hours spent fighting with my own insurance company, mailing documents I had already sent, and repeating the same facts to person after person as if none of it had happened before, and all of that stress could have been avoided entirely with the right coverage in place from the start.
Today I never travel without insurance, and I tell everyone I know the same thing. A policy typically runs somewhere between fifty and two hundred fifty dollars depending on your age, destination, and trip length, and if something goes wrong while you’re away, one phone call connects you to a company that directs you to the right medical facility, coordinates your care, and works directly with the providers on your behalf. Instead of chasing paperwork for months, you can actually focus on getting better.
Beyond the Trip: Long-Term Care Insurance
Andre’s story is about one bad afternoon abroad, but it opened up a much bigger conversation between us about the kind of coverage most people never think to plan for until they’re the ones who need it.
Most of us spend decades saving for retirement, contributing to a 401(k), building an IRA, paying down a mortgage, and planning carefully for the years ahead, yet a lot of people overlook one of the biggest financial risks they may ever face, which is the need for long-term care. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly seventy percent of people turning sixty five today will need some form of long-term care during their lifetime, whether it comes from Alzheimer’s, dementia, a stroke, Parkinson’s, arthritis, a serious injury, or simply the natural process of aging, and the need tends to build up gradually rather than announce itself all at once.
Long-term care insurance is designed to help pay for what traditional health insurance and Medicare generally don’t cover over an extended period, including care at home, assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, adult day care, hospice support, and the coordination of all of it. Most people would rather receive that kind of care at home if they ever need it, and having the right policy in place is what actually makes that preference financially realistic instead of just a hope.
The costs involved are significant, and they keep climbing every year. Current national averages run around eighty thousand dollars annually for home health care, seventy five thousand for assisted living, and more than a hundred twenty thousand for a nursing home, and without insurance, families often end up drawing on retirement savings, investment accounts, or home equity to cover the gap, watching years of careful planning disappear faster than they ever expected.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is waiting too long to buy coverage. Purchasing a policy in your fifties or early sixties usually means lower premiums, easier health qualification, and more choices, while waiting until your seventies often means discovering that health changes in the meantime have made you ineligible altogether. There are also hybrid policies available now that combine life insurance with long-term care benefits, so that if care is ever needed the policy helps pay for it, and if it isn’t, the family typically receives a tax free death benefit instead of the coverage simply going to waste. For a lot of families, that flexibility answers the question that keeps people from buying a policy in the first place, which is what happens if they pay into it for years and never use it.
Long-term care insurance isn’t only about preserving money, either. It protects a spouse’s retirement, a family’s financial future, and a person’s independence and ability to choose where and how they receive care, because without a plan in place, those decisions often become financial ones instead of personal ones. Retirement was never just about building wealth. It’s about protecting it too.
For the In-Between: Short-Term Care Insurance
Not every health setback requires years of ongoing care. Sometimes it’s just a few weeks or months of recovery after an illness, an injury, or a surgery, and that gap in between is exactly what short-term care insurance is built for, helping cover home health care, assisted living, skilled nursing, adult day care, rehabilitation, and care coordination, often for up to a year depending on the policy.
Traditional health insurance is mostly built to treat the medical condition itself, so once you’re discharged from the hospital, a lot of the ongoing support becomes your own responsibility, whether that’s help with bathing, dressing, meal preparation, transportation, or extended rehabilitation, all of which can add up to thousands of dollars a month. Short-term care insurance helps cover those gaps instead of forcing people to pull from retirement accounts or emergency savings just to get through recovery.
There’s an emotional side to all of this too, since family members often become unpaid caregivers by default. Adult children cut back on work hours, and spouses run themselves down trying to fill every gap on their own, when a short-term care policy could let a professional caregiver step in for the hands-on work, freeing up families to focus on being there for each other emotionally instead of managing every logistic themselves.
This kind of coverage tends to make the most sense for adults in their fifties and sixties, retirees, people recovering from surgery, anyone managing a chronic condition, or really anyone who wants to protect the savings they’ve worked so hard to build, and because premiums are generally lower than traditional long-term care insurance, it can be a reasonable and affordable first step into planning ahead. No one plans to need rehabilitation or temporary care, but these situations happen every day, and a modest premium now can save tens of thousands of dollars later while letting you recover with your dignity and independence intact.
Questions? We’re Here to Help
Insurance can be confusing, especially when you’re planning for healthcare needs you can’t fully predict, and if any of this raised questions for you or you’d simply like to understand your options a little better, both Andre is happy to help. Whether it’s protecting your next trip or planning ahead for the years to come, our goal has always been to educate, not to pressure.
Andre Plessis
THE INSURANCE GUY
365 Days a Year Customer Support
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Office: 818-341-2972
Cell: 310-266-9463
Email: Andre.Plessis@gmail.com
Website: www.TheInsuranceGuy.net
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