Travel Insurance
Travel insurance provides financial protection for unexpected events that occur while you are traveling outside your home province, territory, or country. It helps cover emergency medical expenses, trip cancellations, interruptions, delays, lost luggage, and other unforeseen travel-related incidents. The most important component of travel insurance is emergency medical coverage, which pays for hospital and physician costs, medical evacuations, and repatriation in case of serious illness or injury abroad
How It Works
The Travel Health Insurance Association of Canada defines travel insurance as insurance against loss, damage, injury or expense arising from a trip, a definition adopted to identify the class of insurance for licensing and regulation across Canada. The Government of Canada recommends travel health insurance for Canadians travelling outside the country, even for a single day in the United States, because your provincial or territorial health plan is almost certainly not valid abroad, may cover none or only a small part of foreign medical care, will never pay bills up front, and the Government of Canada will not pay your foreign medical bills. For this reason, a policy should always cover medical evacuation to Canada or the nearest place with care, pre-existing medical conditions, and repatriation of remains in case of death outside Canada. Plans focus on emergency care, so routine or elective treatment that could have been received in Canada or deferred until you return is usually not covered. When a non-resident buys travel medical coverage for a stay in Canada, it is often called Visitors to Canada insurance, which covers sudden and unexpected accidents and emergencies and typically not follow-up or recurrent care.
Example:
Imagine a Canadian snowbird driving to the United States for the winter who buys a single-trip travel medical policy before leaving, since their provincial health plan will not pay foreign hospital bills up front. Because they manage a heart condition, they review the policy's stability clause and keep their medication and symptoms unchanged during the required stability period before departure, so the pre-existing condition stays covered. The policy is built for sudden, unexpected emergencies and includes medical evacuation back to Canada, while routine or elective care they could have had at home is excluded.
What to Watch For:
Coverage for a pre-existing medical condition usually depends on a stability clause, which requires no changes to the condition and no new conditions, symptoms or medications during a defined stability period before the trip. Travel health policies also commonly include restrictions and limitations such as duration time limits, age-related maximums, and routine exclusions for expenses arising from suicide, self-inflicted injury, or drug and alcohol abuse, and some policies cover only a certain percentage of costs. One useful detail is that premiums paid to acquire certain travel medical insurance policies can qualify as a medical expense under the Income Tax Act, but only if the amounts are paid to a private health services plan.
