Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Insurance in the context of Retirement Visas and the insurance specifically pertains to COVID-19. I am going to go ahead and quote an article from the Bangkok Post print edition. This is from Thursday October 21, 2021. The article is titled: Health Cover Perks for Foreigners. This article for me was kind of difficult to read. In a sense it was almost an exercise in a level of cognitive dissonance. A couple of times I was wondering if it was written in Newspeak from George Orwell's “Nineteen Eighty Four” and I will explain why in a moment but quoting directly: "The Public Health Ministry is expanding the health insurance ceiling covering COVID-19 treatment to at least US100,000, that is 3 million Baht, for Non-Immigrant Visa O-A applicants to bolster their confidence to stay in the Kingdom".

Well I question whether anybody had any lack of confidence, if their confidence needed bolstering about staying in the Kingdom. As we have discussed in other videos, this is essentially a new insurance requirement associated with the O-A Retirement Visa as a practical matter. Quoting further: "Deputy Public Health Minister Sathit Pitutecha said yesterday the health insurance criteria have been revised for foreigners who hold the Non-Immigrant Visa type O-A for a one-year stay. The change came into effect on Tuesday." As we have discussed, effectively it is not going to have a lot of impact on folks until probably at the earliest August of next year. This may be, "may" let me stress this is me just giving my opinion, this may be one of those things that gets rolled out  and then it either gets tinkered with over time or maybe even walked back because I just see a lot of issues with this. Okay moving forward, quoting again directly: "The health insurance ceiling for foreigners holding this type of Visa would be expanded from 40,000 Baht for outpatient care and 400,000 Baht for inpatient care to at least 3 million Baht which covers medical expenses and COVID -19 treatment." 

Well let's walk through this a minute. The 4 and 4 as I call it, 400,000 Baht inpatient, 40,000 Baht outpatient, that was brought online in October of 2019 to not great fanfare, let me just put it that way. Folks were not real happy about this insurance requirement when it came online. Now it is being expanded upon and it appears there are going to be more insurance requirements moving forward. We are kind of still working through the dynamics of this. We will certainly be making more videos as we come to get a better grip on how this exactly is going to be implemented but the Bangkok Post at least is billing this as a perk. "Well it is a good thing". Well, depending on how you see it, look I have dealt with a lot of retirees over here and many retirees will often tell me "hey I don't view the insurance requirement as onerous at all. I want to have some kind of coverage here in Thailand." Totally understandable. 

That said and again we have done other videos on this discussing these expansions and this insurance expansion and this requirement and how exactly it is going to come in. Again, it only seems to apply at least for now to O-A Visa holders, it doesn't seem to pertain to O Retirement Visa holders but I just thought it was a little bit, I hesitate to say disingenuous but it was very weird reading this article because again it is billed as this “perk” which I think many who have an O-A Retirement Visa might not necessarily view it the same way.