Medical insurance for visitors

[submittedviaemail]

I am looking to purchase medical insurance for my parents who are Indian citizens visiting the US for 6 months (or maybe longer) starting in mid-April. They are 69 and 62 years of age respectively.

I was looking at your website for option and when I put in max coverage of $150,000, no options showed up and it said that the coverage was too high. So I lowered the coverage to $100,000 and then 4-5 options showed up for comprehensive coverage. But within the individual ones, like Atlas America or Visit USA, there is an option to purchase max coverage up to $500,000 or $1 million. So why the discrepancy. Also, the Atlas one is the max lifetime coverage mount while the Visit USA is max coverage per incident... So which one is a better option? My father will turn 70 in early October towards the end of his stay here (unless they stay for more than 6 months), so which plan would be the best option for me for potential renewal for over 70 years of age..

I am also leery of Visit USA and other AIG products, and with all the problems that AIG has recently had.. Any thoughts on that? I have to look into whether LLoyds is doing any better..


Thanks for your input.

[insubuy]

$150,000 is an odd policy maximum and not offered by many products. There is only one product called Liaison Worldwide. And that product gives maximum $50,000 for anyone age 65 years and above.

If you had put other options such as $100,000, $500,000, $1,000,000 etc., you would see many options.

Visit USA has policy maximum per incident, but also has coinsurance of 80/20 up to $5,000 per incident. Depending upon what exactly happens and how much you end up spending in each incident, either plan may work out to be better. In general, it is rare chance that person gets multiple problems in short time, and all of them with high expense.

Even though Visit USA is underwritten by AIG, actually it is underwritten by The Insurance Company of State of Pennsylvania (under AIG umbrella), and from what I understand, it is separately managed and funded company and not directly affected by everything going on with corporate AIG which is in financial trouble.

Lloyds is very stable and the largest, oldest insurance organization in the world.

For your father, if you would like $100,000 when he is 70, the best option is Patriot Platinum America. However, that is minimum $1,000,000 for age below 70.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us at any time.

[submittedviaemail]

Thanks a lot for the explanation. I figured that the program would show me any options with policy maximums greater than 150K if I type in 150K. But that explains.

Also, the Patriot Platinum America seems like a good choice for over 70, but I dont really need 1 Million in coverage before that. So is it pretty easy to switch over to a Patriot Platinum after he turns 70 and choose something else instead now? It would not be a renewal, so are there significant disadvantages to doing that?

[insubuy]

There is really no concept of upgrading/switching. You will have to cancel the current plan or let it expire and buy a new one. All the terms & conditions start all over again.