Travel Insurance and healthcare in the United States

Health insurance is a recently hot topic in the United States. It's easy to ignore and just as easy to get passionate about if it effects you. My friend and business partner George has been complaining about the sad state of healthcare in this country and it has honestly been hard for me to relate. I'm both young and healthy, and until Saturday I'll be lucky enough to be married to someone that works for a relatively large company. (Everyone calm down. We're not getting divorced - Friday is Katie's last day of work.)

Upon researching travel insurance I slowly came to realize that our options for coverage while in the U.S. are pretty limited. Once Katie is no longer working for the Broad Institute we will no longer have employer subsidized health insurance. COBRA is an option, but it will mostly likely be prohibitively more expensive than the plan was while Katie was still an employee.

Our original idea was to purchase travel insurance that would provide medical coverage, but it turns out that the large majority of travel insurance policies do not include coverage while you are in the United States (presumably because of the high cost of healthcare here). You may be wondering why we need coverage while we're in the U.S. - the answer is that we'll be returning to the U.S. for about a month and a half in the summer and it would be nice to have insurance coverage in case we need to return home unexpectedly because of injury or illness.

What are our options?
[1] Buy no insurance. (dumb. but free!)
[2] Buy travel insurance and have coverage overseas but take the risk of not being covered while in the U.S. (slightly less dumb, but still dumb.)
[3] Buy travel insurance and buy U.S. health insurance. (smart. stupid expensive.)

I now feel George's pain.

Option [2] also carries the possible problem of tax penalties in Massachusetts. Moreover, I've heard that having a gap in our U.S. health insurance coverage may make it harder for us to get insurance in the future, but I'm pretty sure that only applies to people with "pre-existing conditions".

IMG to the rescue
So it turns out there are a few insurance plans that cover medical expenses while both overseas and in our home country. The one we will probably go with is IMG's Global Medical Insurance (it's around $1,800 for the year for both of us). The plan comes with the stipulation that you must be traveling abroad for six out of the twelve months of coverage - certainly doable.

To summarize: if we travel for longer than we originally planned it will be cheaper than if we traveled for a shorter length of time and purchased separate U.S. medical insurance. Ok. Gladly.