New poster here but a lurker on the forum for a while. I stumbled on this thread searching for any information about this dilemma, as my husband and I are taking the summer off from working to travel around the US and are realizing how terrible the options for health coverage are for this situation - we're going to be biking so definitely want some sort of coverage in case of an accident. The big thing I'm still confused about is if, say, a hospitalization in the ICU is the result of an emergency visit, whether that counts as "emergency services", which are covered out of network, or "hospitalizations", which per most plans are not covered if out of network or have very high co-insurance. Has anyone found the answer to this? Or maybe it just depends on the situation and how difficult the insurance company wants to be about it...
I had also found the link a few posts above about Blue Cross Blue Shield having national coverage, but for anyone else looking into that I just called Blue Cross Blue Shield and was told they discontinued that Blue Card program for 2018, so emergency care is the only thing covered out of network. It seems like a short term insurance policy or travel insurance may be our best option, although those have coverage limits - like $50,000 max benefits or $2000/day for hospitalization, etc, in some I've looked at - so you could still end up with a big bill with a long hospitalization.
I'm an ER nurse and see every day how messed up the healthcare system is at the moment and how much an unexpected illness/accident can devastate someone's life - it's discouraging to realize that there's pretty much no way to buy insurance that has good coverage for a catastrophic incident unless you stay close to home all the time.