Your Company's Health Insurance Isn't Yours. Here's What That Costs You Later.

I have given the same advice to expatriates for thirty years: hold your own medical insurance, even while your employer covers you.

Most people ignore it. A minority who took it have written to thank me. Nobody who ignored it has ever thanked me — but several have called me from a hospital, and there was nothing I could do by then.

Here is the mechanism, plainly.

Group cover is generous because it doesn't underwrite you

Corporate international schemes typically cover employees without individual medical underwriting. Your history isn't examined. Conditions you already have are usually covered. This is why group cover feels so good, and why people conclude they are well protected.

They are — for exactly as long as they hold the job.

Group cover belongs to the employer, not to you. It ends when the employment ends: redundancy, resignation, retirement, restructuring, or the day the company changes insurer and the new scheme has different terms.

What happens the day it ends

You apply for an individual policy. For the first time in perhaps a decade, you are medically underwritten — assessed on the health you have now, not the health you had when you joined the company.

If nothing has happened to you, you get standard terms and you were lucky.

If something has happened — and between 35 and 55, something usually has — the insurer will do one of four things: cover you normally, load your premium, exclude the condition permanently, or decline you.

Note what an exclusion means. Not "we'll cover it after a waiting period." Not "at a higher price." A named permanent exclusion means that condition, its complications, and its follow-up are yours to pay for, for as long as you hold that policy — and every other insurer you approach will reach the same conclusion, because they are underwriting the same medical file.

Why cancer is the case I use

Because it is the one that ruins people, and because it does not care about your career plan.

A serious oncology pathway — diagnostics, surgery, infusions, oral targeted therapy over eighteen months or more, imaging every few months — runs into figures that end most families' finances. Covered by your corporate scheme, it is an administrative matter. Diagnosed three months after you left, with no personal policy in force, it is the event that undoes thirty years of saving.

And here is the cruelty of the sequence: if you are diagnosed while covered by the group and then the employment ends, you are simultaneously losing the cover and acquiring the pre-existing condition that makes replacement cover impossible. The two happen in the same week.

That is the risk. It is not that you cannot afford insurance. It is that you become uninsurable at precisely the moment you need to buy.

What you are actually buying

This is the part people misunderstand. A personal policy held alongside group cover is not there to pay your GP bills — the group scheme does that. You are buying one thing:

“Continuous underwriting history, established at the youngest and healthiest point available to you.”

An individual policy taken out at 32 and never lapsed carries your 32-year-old medical file forever. Conditions that develop after inception are covered, because they arose during cover. That is the whole asset. It cannot be bought retrospectively and it cannot be recovered once broken.

The honest objection

Paying twice for a decade is a real cost, not a rounding error. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling.

The advice is strongest if you are over 35, if you have any family history, if you are in a market with no accessible public alternative, or if you can foresee leaving corporate employment — going independent, retiring abroad, being restructured out. It is weakest for a healthy 27-year-old on a strong scheme in a country with a functioning public system.

There is also a cheaper way to do it that most people never consider. You do not need a comprehensive personal plan running in parallel. A low-cost, high-limit, inpatient-only catastrophe plan — the kind with a large annual maximum and no outpatient benefit — costs a fraction of full cover and does the job, because the job is establishing and maintaining continuous insurability. Your group scheme handles day-to-day; your personal policy holds the door open.

Two questions to ask this week

If you have group cover now: ask HR, in writing, whether the scheme includes a continuation or transfer option — a right to move to an individual policy without new underwriting when you leave. Many schemes have one. Most have a short window, often thirty to sixty days from termination. Almost nobody knows it exists until the window has closed.

If you are between jobs now: do not let cover lapse while you decide. A gap of a few weeks can convert a covered condition into an excluded one. Continuity is the asset; breaking it is the loss.

The one-line version

Your salary is your employer's to withdraw. Your health record is yours forever. Insure the second one while it is still clean.

“Ask Mira what a personal catastrophe plan would cost alongside your corporate cover — and whether your group scheme has a continuation option.”

Written and verified by Jean-Marc Herbet — Managing Director, Expat Medicare. Thirty years advising expatriates on international private medical insurance across Asia. Expat Medicare is a licensed IPMI brokerage. General information, not personal, medical or financial advice. Underwriting practice, continuation rights and exclusion terms vary by insurer, scheme, market and policy year. Refer to your scheme documentation and to the policy documents issued with any quotation.