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Post by bjd on Sept 1, 2016 6:39:59 GMT
All these years of travelling without insurance, I just bought some for the next trip, after Lizzy's story.
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Post by tod2 on Sept 1, 2016 7:44:39 GMT
LIzzy - we are also not going to pay roaming costs so will do as we always do, get a pay-as-you-ago' simcard in Paris - and because of my travel preparedness know that right on the corner near our hotel at Nation, there is a SFR store. It will still be open for an hour or two after we arrive. Although you never know - they could let us down which means taking the metro to the Orange store Kerouac hooked me up at last year or there is always the big SFR on Champs Elysees. When we arrive in Switzerland that will definitely be a new experience getting hooked up again.
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Post by bjd on Sept 1, 2016 8:28:21 GMT
Well, with my Free (name of the provider, not the cost!) I can now use my cell phone for calling, data, SMS etc in Canada for 35 days a year as part of my regular subscription. Not that I need it a lot, but I won't have to ask someone in the bus to send a text message to say the bus is late, as happened last year.
I pay 15€99 a month.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2016 9:01:39 GMT
Thank you, bjd, for getting the insurance. The kickstarter campaign for my friend is approaching £15,000. (The goal has just gone up another £5,000, so I guess that's not good). Yes, both Canada and Scotland have "free" healthcare, but not when you're a guest in each other's countries. If nothing else, I'd want to be able to be repatriated (in a box or not).
My cell phone cost is probably 5X that of yours, without any roaming, but I have no choice. lagatta is right, cell phone costs in Canada are extortionate, but until the country enacts legislation to bring it in line with other countries, we're stuck with it.
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Post by bjd on Sept 1, 2016 10:03:02 GMT
You're welcome, Lizzy! As with all insurance, if you have it, you don't need it, so I'm sure everything will go smoothly, as it always does.
That word "free" about healthcare really annoys me -- it's not free but paid by salary or other deductions. Whether it's in Canada, Scotland or France.
Yes, I know cell phones are really expensive in Canada. I always used to think of Canada as being cheap compared to France, but in my trips over the past few years, I think it's very expensive for travel (no discount airlines, really expensive buses and trains and not all that well-run) and accommodation. Medical costs are "reasonable" only compared to the States, but high compared to France.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2016 10:26:45 GMT
Yes, that is why I put "free" in quotes. The preconceptions annoy me, as well. We all pay for it in the end. Yes, it's expensive to live in Canada, but with the exchange rate lately, my husband still thinks everything is a deal. We seem to live in a twilight world, trapped between the free market hell of the US and the socialist utopia of Europe. Back more than a decade ago, when things got really ugly after the US invaded Iraq, there was a some agitation about where Canada's emotional loyalties lay. I would have loved us to leave NAFTA and join the EU. Cheap cheese and wine!
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Post by bjd on Sept 1, 2016 10:57:18 GMT
Well, the cheese isn't cheap but still cheaper than in Canada. I won't argue about the price of wine though.
I read that Canada and the EU signed a trade pact recently so maybe prices will go down on those products.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2016 11:06:23 GMT
Wouldn't that be grand. However, the high prices on wine have to do with our taxes rather than the cost of purchasing them from Europe. My solution is simply that I drink half as much in Vancouver as I do in Seattle, and I'm sure my body appreciates that.
As far as travel insurance goes, if I have to cancel a trip and lose the money I spent on flights, hotels, etc., that's minor and absorbable. The thought of being stuck with tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare costs is frightening. I traveled without insurance in my twenties; now that I'm older, no way!
WhenI moved to Europe in 1990, I had British residency status through my grandparents, which enabled me to get healthcare. Before I moved to Rome to teach I arranged my reciprocal coverage. I'm so glad I did, because when I fell so ill there, there was no way I would have been anle to pay for the tests and care.
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Post by tod2 on Sept 1, 2016 12:38:09 GMT
Am I ready...I think so. Have spent most of today getting the last essential things organised. I shopped for 12 loaves of bread, 10 litres of milk, and a few treats for my garden man and my housemaid Phillapina. Yesterday she cooked up an enormous vegetable stew for him and froze it in portions. They will both be coming to the house everyday except weekends. She has my front door key and had her first introduction to turning the alarm on when she leaves and how to turn it off when opening the house. Contact phone numbers and alarm code has been stuck behind the guest toilet door in case she needs to remind herself. I even remembered to bury the small pink tablets in mincemeat and are now in the freezer. Should the weather turn thundery and Patch gets aggitated Phillapina will remove a mince iceblock and neuk it in the microwave for her. I hope that's all - maybe I can pack my case now... imageshack.com/a/img924/630/39mz4C.jpg
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Post by fumobici on Sept 1, 2016 14:18:26 GMT
Thank you, bjd, for getting the insurance. The kickstarter campaign for my friend is approaching £15,000. (The goal has just gone up another £5,000, so I guess that's not good). Yes, both Canada and Scotland have "free" healthcare, but not when you're a guest in each other's countries. If nothing else, I'd want to be able to be repatriated (in a box or not). I'm quite surprised the Scottish health service was even able to generate a presumably itemized fee for services bill for your friend. My father required a surgery in Italy as legal resident and of course has American based health insurance, but the Italian hospital doesn't operate on a fee for service accounting basis so they couldn't write up an itemized bill for services even if they had wanted to. It was explained that the administrative overhead necessary to present a patient with a fee for service bill would cost far more than simply providing occasional services to non-citizens would. As a result, neither he nor his insurance were ever billed for the surgery. In fact one of the principle upsides of a universal single payer health care system is the huge efficiency gained by not needing to maintain an enormous billing/accounting bureaucracy for fee for services accounting for individual patients. It should be significantly cheaper in terms of overall costs not to have the inefficiency of that accounting bureaucracy in place that could generate patient billing.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2016 14:43:03 GMT
Yes, fumo, not sure how all of this is going down, but it is a sobering lesson for us all. Perhaps, if he had needed antibiotics for a bladder infection it would have made less of a dent in Scottish healthcare.
Here is the latest update:
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Post by htmb on Sept 1, 2016 14:52:40 GMT
Fumobici, I had the same experience both times I visited the emergency opthamology clinic in Paris. Though they asked me if I had a French health card (no), and I later asked them if they had a bill for me (no), I was not charged for either visit. What I'm guessing would have cost $1,000 USD for each time, would have cost €30 according to one of the specialists I saw on my second hospital visit.
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Post by tod2 on Sept 1, 2016 15:08:56 GMT
I got a bill for 98 euros from the Hôpital Lariboisière for my 2hr visit and treatment. At the admin they took a photocopy of my medical insurance, passport and home address. I didn't bother claiming it back. I actually never expected a bill but sent the amount with my credit card...they sent me a receipt.
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Post by fumobici on Sept 1, 2016 15:13:51 GMT
Fumobici, I had the same experience both times I visited the emergency opthamology clinic in Paris. Though they asked me if I had a French health card (no), and I later asked them if they had a bill for me (no), I was not charged for either visit. What I'm guessing would have cost $1,000 USD for each time, would have cost €30 according to one of the specialists I saw on my second hospital visit. This is really the only logical way to run a public single payer health system. The fact that the Scottish hospital was generating fee for services billing in this case, suggests they are operating in a seriously inefficient manner. It's also astonishing to me that various public health systems don't have reciprocal agreements in place to deal with travelers who require health care without generating patient billing paperwork. Every dollar spent on patient side accounting, billing, collections... (and the costs are enormous) is a dollar that cannot be spent on patient care. That's, of course ignoring the moral hazards and perverse incentives built into any fee for services or for-profit model of health care delivery. Private health insurance for nonelective care should really be illegal too, what value does it or could it add to any system whose purpose is to treat and prevent illness?
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Post by bjd on Sept 2, 2016 8:54:00 GMT
Within the European Union, you are covered for health problems through a reciprocal system. If you are travelling to one of the EU countries on vacation, you ask for a form (E111?) before you leave and then you don't have to advance anything, or if you do (I am guessing here never having had to deal with it), you are reimbursed quite fast.
It's a whole other situation dealing with countries with expensive health care, like the States. One of my sisters-in-law worked in NYC for a few years. She was covered by her French company health plan. When she first sent back a bill for something like $125 for a GP visit (this was in the mid-1990s), the amount was questioned in Paris. The $400 specialist bill was even more questioned!
I'm surprised BC public health insurance only reimburses $75/day. That's nowhere near what it costs to spend a day in a hospital anywhere in Canada, let alone in an intensive care or cardiology unit.
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Post by patricklondon on Sept 2, 2016 11:01:43 GMT
Within the European Union, you are covered for health problems through a reciprocal system. If you are travelling to one of the EU countries on vacation, you ask for a form (E111?) before you leave and then you don't have to advance anything, or if you do (I am guessing here never having had to deal with it), you are reimbursed quite fast. Not quite. The EHIC (which replaced E111) covers you only to the extent that the country you're visiting covers its own citizens/residents. If they're charged at the point of use, so are you. Your home system may reimburse you for charges it wouldn't charge to people in the home system, but not any extras, and certainly not all of the follow-on costs of coping with, say, a catastrophic injury, like medical repatriation. You're always advised to have additional travel insurance as well as the EHIC. There are also similar reciprocal agreements between Britain and a number of non-EU countries. My blog | My photos | My video clips"too literate to be spam"
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Post by bjd on Sept 2, 2016 11:29:19 GMT
Thanks for the correction, Patrick. As I said, I haven't had any experience with it myself.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2016 16:09:15 GMT
My grandmother had a heart attack when she was living with my parents in the US. She was in the hospital there for about three weeks, which generated (even back in 1982) a hospital bill of about $25,000. My parents had to advance the funds but were reimbursed 100% by my grandmother's coverage (which was 'Prévoyance SNCF' instead of 'Assurance maladie' which is what most of us have).
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Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2016 21:32:09 GMT
This is the opposite of travel preparedness. I signed up to a stupid Air France contest on facebook, and now they want me and my husband to be in downtown Vancouver on September 9th, all packed with passports in hand, ready to fly to France immediately. Great idea, but sheesh! Who the heck does this? Retirees? Rich but bored gamblers? Insane people? You also get four nights at a hotel.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 3, 2016 3:55:25 GMT
There used to be a game show in a few countries (Wikipedia says Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the United States, the Netherlands, and Portugal.) where the entire studio audience had to show up ready to leave, with passport and luggage.
Good luck!
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Post by Deleted on Sept 3, 2016 4:20:09 GMT
Oh, I can't go, I have to work.
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Post by tod2 on Sept 3, 2016 5:49:13 GMT
Oooo, that contest reminds me of property schemes that used to run here years ago. I think they have stopped now due to the fact when 99% of the attendees only got an engraved biro pen and a bottle of wine they were really cheesed off. Some had come from miles away thinking they would be the one to get the apartment, house, time-share etc.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 29, 2020 20:10:32 GMT
Being prepared to travel to live in a new country is quite complicated but by now we are reasonably adept at it. The most time has been spent on keeping abreast of the latest regulations concerning entry to those we will be transiting through and our final destination. A problem we've not had before is due to taking our car, the amount of stuff one of us in this relationship has decided would come in useful and as we have all that space in the said car, why don't we take it with us?
Add on to that one of our daughters will stay there with us after flying out a week or so later to complete an online course for several months. She just so happens to have managed to whittle her belongings and clothes down to three large suitcases which it is imperative we also transport. One suitcase is apparently nearly full of decorations for her room so she feels at home. I will have one 20kg soft case and a cabin bag. I daren't yet discover how much Mrs M has but I think along the lines of two or three cases as well. Add that on to the Ikea stuff that somehow has been bought (in Germany) and needs taking to make the apartment also 'homely' and well......
I'll start and finish packing tomorrow though and then the next day, the 31st, will see Mrs M and I drive to Sarajevo. It's about 1500km from where we are and the first 630km or so is in Germany. Then transit through Austria, 320km, and into Slovenia. As we were previously allowed 12 hours to transit Slovenia (70km) we were going to visit and sleep/celebrate New Year for a while at a relative just off the main road/route, but the authorities have now cut this down to 6 hours. We'll still visit but have just a snooze instead and in the early hours of the 1st, continue on. Next is Croatia. We must transit within 12 hours but it is only 220km even with skirting around Zagreb. Then we'll see about entering Bosnia and finishing it off.
You'll probably not know if we've arrived because we won't have internet there until I sort it out.
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Post by mich64 on Dec 30, 2020 1:12:16 GMT
Wishing you and your family safe and uneventful travels! Will you have to stay in a hotel until your apartment is available?
That is quite a journey to make during winter, I hope the weather or road conditions do not cause you delays. I expect with your extensive driving experience, this will be more of a challenge than a burden.
All the best to this new chapter in your life.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 30, 2020 2:49:50 GMT
That's kind of shabby & really frustrating about the time to transit Slovenia being cut in half. I would think the fact that you have relatives there, i.e., your whereabouts can easily be traced, would have allowed you more time, not less. As a very efficient packer, my suggestion is that you get your daughter to try to get the same amount of stuff in the three cases into only two. There must be some incentive that will work. Not my business, but it just seems that if the car looks less crammed full of stuff it is less likely to be combed over at a border. Gee whiz ~ think of all the nifty passport stamps y'all are gonna have! Should we not see your smiling face here until 2021, may you and all the onlyMark family have a lovely, hassle-free trip and new year.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 30, 2020 7:03:35 GMT
Mich, the apartment we will rent is already available. Mrs M sorted it out when she was there for a month. We will just arrive, get the keys and go straight in. The internet is one of those small things that need to be arranged in the first few days but everything else is in place. I am going to soon check the weather forecasts and see what weather we may encounter but I am crossing my fingers and we'll be prepared anyway with food, hot drinks and snow chains (which I was taking to Bosnia anyway) in the extreme.
Bixa, until last week we could spend up to 72 hours there visiting 'close' relatives. As the new covid variant has taken hold they've clamped down on this, ended that exception and reduced the transit times. It is what it is, we just have to cope with it - though I was a little more interested in the journey when it became a little more of an adventure, and travelling overnight does that for me. Normally with Mrs M when we drive a long way we have shorter driving days, stop off somewhere nice for the night and a good walk round. Yes, interesting and relaxing with breaking the journey up, but when I'm alone I treat it as doing something unusual, more of an 'adventure' and start without a plan as to where I would stop, if I do at all.
Getting my daughter to trim down her belongings would be a major exercise and unless she lived with us all the time, ultimately unsuccessful. Even though these things will be in the car I have a principal that she will put them in herself and take them out. I don't touch them and it is up to her to lug them around up and down stairs or whatever. That's never mind the three large handbags she has to have for some reason. She will be flying out to us in a week or so and a) all her stuff will remain in the car until she arrives then she can unload them and take them up to the apartment and b) her flight ticket is only including a cabin bag, so for a week she's had to decided what she will have whilst away from her luggage. That was stressful I'm sure for her.
Passport stamps - I'm not even sure if I'll get one entering Bosnia. Do they stamp it? No idea. I know the other countries don't so I expect ours will remain somewhat blank still. Shame in a way. I still have all my old ones and enjoy looking back in them and the story told by the stamps.
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Post by mickthecactus on Dec 30, 2020 12:12:33 GMT
So impressed at how organised you are Mark. Even though I’ve been to Spain many times I still get into panic mode until I finally get to the apartment.
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Post by onlyMark on Dec 30, 2020 12:46:56 GMT
Who says I don't panic? For the last few days I've been trying to anticipate what it'll be that we didn't do or we've left behind.
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Post by lugg on Dec 30, 2020 13:17:13 GMT
Good luck Mark - hope it all goes to plan.
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Post by htmb on Dec 30, 2020 14:41:41 GMT
Sounds like quite the adventure. Good luck!
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