October 20 - Insurance

First, I'd like to say that today I was supposed to be in China. To any of my friends who have been expecting me to have left already, you'll just have to be stuck with me for a while longer. On the other hand, if you haven't had a chance to see me before I leave, now is the time!

So, my latest adventure has to do with the acquisition of expat medical insurance (yes, "expat" is apparently a technical insurance term). I knew I had to get insurance, but it was written on the website of the recruiting company I was hired by (Footprints Recruiting) that my employer would be purchasing expat medical insurance for me, so I didn't worry about it very much.

That was a mistake.



After several inquiries about my insurance, it finally came to light that my employers were going to purchase Chinese insurance once I had entered China. For those of you not familiar with Chinese insurance, it has a particularly terrible reputation and is not something you want to rely on, should you choose to work in China.

I'm not going to turn down Chinese insurance - it's still better than nothing - but to be safe (and to keep my parents from worrying too much) it will be better for me to have insurance from elsewhere to supplement it.

So, not knowing that expat medical insurance is a technical term, I naively went to check out Canadian travel insurance offerings. Travel insurance is unavailable to people like me because, if I leave the country for more than 6 months, I lose coverage under my government's health care regime and travel insurance only covers people who have other home-based insurance. I threw up my hands in a dramatic gesture of impending doom and felt the world crumbling around me.

Then I realized that there was something off about this situation, because I knew that teachers were being insured while they were overseas and a quick check of American insurance coverage showed that travel insurance in that country works the same way, more or less, as it does in Canada.

Fortunately, I remembered reading something about acquiring insurance on Footprints' website and went back to see what they had to say on the subject. That's when I found out that traveler's insurance and expat insurance are not the same thing. I then stopped being melodramatic and all was well.