The question behind the question, whenever someone asks about long-term travel with kids, is usually healthcare. What happens if someone gets sick over there?
After years of traveling 3 to 4 months annually with children, here is our honest answer: someone always gets sick, we have used doctors and hospitals on multiple continents, and the care has been excellent at prices that sound like typos. These are real bills.
Our family's receipts
- Singapore: our daughter got sick, so we used the walk-in clinic at the mall. $30 for the doctor, $20 for the medicine, $50 total.
- Costa Rica: sick kid again, walk-in clinic, about $20.
- Thailand: my husband got an MRI plus specialist visits at Bumrungrad International in Bangkok, one of the best hospitals in Asia, for roughly $100 all in.
- Mexico: while pregnant with Ryker, I had an anatomy scan with a fetal specialist at a hospital. It took about an hour and a half and was the most thorough exam I have ever had, for $107 cash. Back in the US, my OB insisted on redoing the same scan for $900, performed by a tech, with a separate appointment to have a doctor interpret it.
The bills that made believers out of us
A family from our community spent 11 months abroad and stress-tested the system harder than we ever have.
Mom slipped off a pull-up bar in Chile and broke her wrist. The first clinic did the doctor visit, X-rays, and cast completely free. A second opinion at the private clinic locals consider "the expensive one" cost $35 for the doctor and $35 for X-rays, new cast included, $70 total. The follow-up in Peru weeks later (cast off, new X-rays, splint) ran $100 to $150.
Their daughter caught influenza A and, unable to hold down liquids, needed an ambulance and three nights on IV fluids in a Chilean hospital. Total bill: about $900 for the hospital, plus roughly $250 for the ambulance and the initial clinic. In the US, a pediatric ER admission with a three-night stay would plausibly start at $15,000 to $20,000. Three nights in the hospital for $900.
Same family, back in the US: dad broke a bone in his hand, and spent a week and a half unable to get any orthopedist to see him. The scheduling system offered a primary care appointment months out, by which point the bone would have healed however it pleased. The care gap between "world class medicine" and "medicine you can actually access" is not the direction Americans assume.
The insurance layer
For trips, we use SafetyWing. Comparable nomad medical plans run about $50 to $70 per adult monthly with a $250 deductible. Here is the funny part: at these prices, the insurance rarely activates. The $70 cast and the $100 MRI never hit the deductible. The one time it mattered, the $900 hospitalization, it worked exactly as designed.
For our long trips of 4 to 6 months, we cancel US coverage entirely and carry a $90 a month worldwide plan that covers everything except the US. Read that sentence again: the only country the affordable global health plan will not touch is ours.
How to use this
Practical rules if you are new to care abroad. In most of the world you walk in without a referral and see a doctor the same day. Private hospitals in major cities (the Bangkok, Singapore, and Mexico City tier) publish cash prices and cater to international patients. Pharmacies dispense many medications over the counter that require prescriptions in the US, at a fraction of the price. And your travel medical policy's deductible is often higher than the entire bill, so keep receipts but expect to pay cash and move on.
None of this is a substitute for insurance or for judgment. It is a correction to the fear that keeps families home. The healthcare question should not stop your first mini-retirement. If anything, it is a reason to go.
Medical costs and access vary by country and situation, and this is our family's experience, not medical advice. Carry travel medical insurance and know where the good hospitals are before you need one.
