I agree with your sentiment and believe this is just a shitty fly-by-night fake "insurance" company that collects premiums and dispenses plane tickets, but insurers aren't obligated to pay top dollar for whatever course of treatment you deem necessary without any opportunity for negotiation. If they're footing your bill, they get to have a say in the matter of when and how the job gets done.
He paid pennies for the "coverage." With that being the case and his being a British citizen, their treatment plan for everything is likely to fly patients back to the UK whenever possible. You don't become a billion-pound company charging 200 pounds at a time while also reimbursing first-world medical claims for travelers who aren't paralyzed in an ICU. I doubt they offer similar coverage to non-Brits for the same price, if at all.
We have similar plans wrt auto insurance in the US. You can either get proper insurance and pay a fair amount or the legal bare minimum for pennies, and when you get in your first at-fault accident you quickly learn what it is you have (or haven't) been paying for.
I've certainly never thought that was the case, and I don't think my comment implied that (I've edited it for clarity anyway).
What I meant was, I've always assumed that if I had an accident abroad, it would cover me for any surgery I needed in the immediate aftermath, until I was well enough to either resume my trip, or fly home somewhat comfortably.
I still don't think that's an unreasonable assumption, but I've learned something today!
Depends on the policy but I doubt there is a "somewhat comfortably" clause - if you want your insurance policy to cover you you generally have to follow what their policy requires and with cheapo insurance like this, if you are clear to fly, you are expected to fly home.
It's gonna be very difficult to get onto a plane and then claim you were unable to fly even if Singapore is a world closer to Indonesia than the UK.
I feel for this guy though, the situation sucks.
Yep, and this post has been an education for me!
However, I still have issues with the way it's marketed. I think part of the problem is showing these huge numbers for medical cover. It's almost a psychological trick, in the same way that lottery players see an enormous jackpot and somehow conflate it with the likelihood of winning. It's falsely reassuring.
In reality, most claimants are going to spend much less than 1% of that £5 million limit before they get flown home. It only really applies to people who are at death's door and end up with a long stay in intensive care, or need a fully-staffed medical flight to get them home.
Exactly, but you're saying it like it's a bad thing instead of "this is just what travel insurance is and why it's so cheap."
I still think it’s marketed in a deliberately misleading way.
With travel insurance generally, I think there's a distinction between emergency medical care you need RIGHT NOW and medical care that you need at some point.
If I get hit by a train and need to be pieced back together, am in the ICU, etc. I'd expect travel insurance to pay for that, up to the total coverage. If I get diagnosed with a slow moving cancer that needs treatment (but not today), I wouldn't expect travel insurance to cover it. I'd expect this to be laid out in the longer agreements I'm sure he had to sign to get this insurance. That's the difference between travel insurance and health insurance. I (Canadian) can get travel insurance for a trip to the US for damn cheap; that doesn't mean I can go live in the US and use that insurance for my day-to-day stuff.
Whether this particular incident is closer to the train or the cancer might be an open question. I think the key point, and maybe where he loses the argument, is that he already flew to Singapore. He took a ~3 hour flight in a worse state then when the insurance company advised him to fly home. Don't think he's going to win this one.
Also a ~14hr flight is a completely different proposition. Totally healthy people feel like shit after a flight that long. I really wouldn't want to take one if I was already in significant pain.
Flying you home and palming you off onto the state seems kinda shady to me. That’s not really “medical cover”, it’s just a flight home. And to make matters worse they made out as if flying him home was doing him a favour.
EDIT: Reading some of the other comments makes me think I’m just another mug who doesn’t read his insurance policies. But I still think that offering “£5,000,000 in medical cover” without qualifying that it really means "£5,000,000 in medical cover, only if we absolutely can't get you home and get the NHS to do it for free", borders on deliberately misleading.