With so much choice out there, you’ll need to be clear on what you need. How often do you travel? Is the medical standard vastly different in your destination country? Where do you usually go for medical treatment? Do you need coverage for pre-existing health conditions? (That’s heath conditions you have prior to securing an insurance plan.) Are you planning to start a family? These are just some of the questions to consider.

Unfortunately, insurers use jargon. This means you’ll need to highlight any unfamiliar terms in the insurance policy (some examples are exclusions, pre-existing conditions, deductible, co-payment, etc.) and research them, to ensure that you fully understand what the plan entails.

While it may be tempting to choose a plan based on cost alone, you should refrain from doing so. Cheap plans that seem too good to be true usually have a catch. This may be a limited hospital network (something you want to avoid during an emergency), slow and/or difficult claims processing, and poor service overall. A lot of these factors may be difficult to spot from the policy alone, and takes years of working with the insurer to realize.