Limitations for expatriates insurance

In Pitsas Insurances our commitment is to be able provide medical insurance services to locals and expatriates in Cyprus. Nevertheless, as many customers have noticed our international medical insurance plans have some limitations regarding the expatriates with permanent residence outside Cyprus. This has to do with the insurance regulations in the countries of the expatriates.

Firstly, there are certain countries with insurance regulations which require all residents to have medical insurance, but where there are very specific features the medical insurance must have. In practice, residents of these countries must purchase a specially designed and locally licensed plan, if they are to meet the regulations. They will typically not meet the regulations if they instead purchase an international medical plan such as ours, even if our plan provides a superb overall level of cover. For these reasons we do not cover people who have their main residential address in countries of this kind, good examples being the USA, Canada or the UAE.

Many more countries require just the local nationals to have a particular type of local medical insurance. We can cover expatiates in those countries, but not the local nationals. As a general rule, when the country of residence is in the EU, such as Cyprus, then we can also cover local nationals as well as expatriates. But for most countries outside the EU we can cover expatriates only (except in the case of employee groups, which can usually include a small percentage of locals). In the ex-CIS countries (such as Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) we therefore cover expatriates, but not local nationals.

I must stress that all these comments relate to an applicant’s primary residential address as supplied to us on their application form. Someone from an ex-CIS country providing a residential in Cyprus is also covered for trips back to their home country during their policy year. We even allow such a person to choose to go back to their home country for treatment. But, for most clients of a non-EU nationality, we won’t be able to offer cover when the residential address and nationality are the same on the application form.