Travel medical cover, including on Medicare

Original Medicare generally does not pay for care outside the United States, with a short list of narrow exceptions. Some Medigap plans include a limited foreign travel emergency benefit with a lifetime cap, and some Advantage plans include worldwide emergency cover — but 'emergency' is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Travel medical policies are short-term, trip-length plans that pay for emergency treatment abroad and, crucially, for medical evacuation. Evacuation is the expense that turns a bad holiday into a financial event, and it is the reason we recommend the cover for long trips even to people with generous plans at home.

• Trip-length cover, bought per journey rather than per year
• Emergency medical evacuation and repatriation as the headline benefit
• Pre-existing condition clauses read before departure, not at the hospital desk
• Checked against the Medigap or Advantage benefit you may already hold