Kategorie: News
From the world of insurance
This article was written from the perspective of the aqua med team, but certainly also applies to other assistance centres, diving accident insurers and foreign travel health insurers. In any case, the aqua med claims handlers have plenty of stories to tell that are astonishing and certainly provoke a certain amount of anger...
Report by: Tina Rahner (Key Account Manager at aqua med)
Cows can be milked and the insurance cow is in some people's eyes a high-performance specimen that can be sucked dry to the last drop ... surely one or two of you have already received treatment bills abroad that make your breath catch in your throat or threaten a moderate life crisis. Well, we don't know how much a similar treatment costs at home, as most of us present our insurance card, but many are quite rightly shocked when they are asked to pay abroad. And in some cases, even for relatively trivial illnesses and treatments. A home visit in the USA for an inflamed mosquito bite can cost USD 3,100, mind you this is only for the doctor's journey, then the treatment costs are added, which brings the final bill to an incredible USD 4,500.
This article was written from the perspective of the aqua med team, but certainly applies to other assistants, diving accident insurers and foreign travel health insurers as well. In any case, our aqua med claims handlers have plenty of stories to tell that cause astonishment and a certain amount of anger.
Fortunately, many of our customers call our emergency hotline, which has several advantages:
1. we have the opportunity to review the treatment and assess whether everything is going its orderly way. If, in our opinion, the treatment is not adequate, we intervene and protect our customers.
2. the costs do not have to be paid by you, as we bill the service provider directly.
3. someone in the field (namely us) can look at the treatment and billing and check it for correctness. Treatment measures that are not necessary and costs that are billed too high will be reduced.
Simply laying out an unlimited amount of costs and then settling them with your assistance/insurer may work in most cases and you may think that it only affects the insurer ... But that's far from the truth, because, in keeping with the insurance cow, this may be a milkmaid's calculation, but in the end it's not the insurer who pays for it, but you. This is because the insurer will raise prices if claims costs rise.
So to avoid unnecessary costs and keep premiums stable for you, we do a lot, provided we are involved in good time.
If the payments are processed through us, they are checked by so-called external cost containment experts or sent to embassy doctors for examination. Of course, this costs fees, which are borne by the insurer.
A small excerpt from an Egyptian invoice in which the total costs were reduced from €2,500 to €950 without bankrupting anyone: The medication, which was estimated at €150, was very generously rounded up to €9 - based on the official Egyptian medication price index.
Unfortunately, patients in some countries are put under massive pressure and it is claimed that you have to pay the bills yourself. In this case, all you have to do is refer them to us vehemently and inform us briefly by telephone. We will then take over and all you have to do is take care of your recovery. Well, maybe not quite, because you have to be tough with the doctors, billing centres or hotels and keep referring them to us.
You may even have to ask for the hotel manager, because they'll lie and fib as much as they can so that they can pocket the high costs. All kinds of tricks are used here and it is said, for example, that the direct billing of patients has been agreed with us, which is simply a lie.
Most clinics are aware of the billing procedure, even if not all of them like it for the reasons mentioned above. As diving medical assistance, we are also counted among the species of insurance cows, which hopefully cannot be milked exploitatively with your help. With good co-operation and reasonable invoicing, we will of course pay promptly and reliably. In other words, with decent feeding and good care, you will get a reasonable portion of milk.
CONCLUSION: Call our emergency hotline and let us sort everything out!