It’s quite amazing that one could be so forgetful as to fail know when their vital travel documents become obsolete. It’s more so if the discovery is only made at the airport, while trying to check-in and head off, or if its not such that would prevent one making the trip but essential to it, it’s only found out when hundreds of miles far away from home. Imagine the situation being a medical emergency and the only gateway to free and urgent healthcare was, in fact, long overdue for renewal.
These and much else are what some people in the UK have been found to find less time to put straight before embarking on dream holidays.
The European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) may not have the same strength or provide the kind of coverage travel insurance, probably customized to taste, would give. It nonetheless offers certain level of guarantee that once on a foreign land one would not be entirely alone.
Three years ago the EHIC replaced the E111 form and since then at least 28 million people in the UK have been issued it. It entitles them to free healthcare or reduced cost if they were to fall ill or in the event of an accident while abroad.
This is, however, dependent on whether it was valid at the time of the emergency.
It took the Department of Health’s warning, following a study recently, to bring to the general notice that people do not give enough priority to ensuring that essentials like the EHIC, bankcards and even passports are always up to date.
The case of expired passports is more startling with 20 per cent of people in the survey saying they hardly know when it expires. A further 42 per cent, it was revealed, confessed they had to hurriedly dash to the passport office to have it renewed shortly before their scheduled trips.
Where some had the situation remedied, many others were not so lucky and had to pay a costly price. In the case of some 1.2 million participants in the poll, it was not a happy ending as they missed out on their trip because their passport was not valid, which they found out only when it was too late.
Whereas the cost one pays for such negligence could be limited before heading off, it becomes almost impossible to do anything to control it if the worst was to happen while abroad. For example, finding out that one’s EHIC card was no longer valid only when there was an emergency could be very devastating in terms of the financial and psychological impact.
From the September of this year to March 2009, the three million EHIC issued late in 2005 and early in the following year will expire. Yet many of the holders don’t even know. This is not completely surprising as the survey of 2,000 UK adults also discovered that most people are not even concerned about their healthcare when far away from home. This is despite about 2.4 million saying they had been in situations where they were not adequately insured and needed medical assistance.
Even if people fancy taking risks with other things, doing the same with healthcare is a huge danger that must be avoided. While analyst still worry that many may yet fail to heed warning and renew their expiring EHIC, people need to know that they, in addition, need to have adequate travel insurance befitting of the kind of holiday they are taking. At least they would a piece of mind if things were to go wrong, peradventure.
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