The case of a visitor from the Czech Republic who caught Covid-19 while visiting Hawaii is making news elsewhere, but has apparently remained under the radar here.

I saw the case referenced in a New York Times column on Monday (“ Don’t Want a Vaccine? Be Prepared to Pay More for Insurance”).

Getting hospitalized with Covid-19 in the United States typically generates huge bills. Those submitted by Covid patients to the NPR-Kaiser Health News “Bill of the Month” project include a $17,000 bill for a brief hospital stay in Marietta, GA (reduced to about $4,000 for an uninsured patient under a “charity care” policy); a $104,000 bill for a fourteen-day hospitalization in Miami for an uninsured man; possibly hundreds of thousands for a two-week hospital stay — some of it on a ventilator — for a foreign tourist in Hawaii whose travel health insurance contained a “pandemic exclusion.”

When I looked further, I quickly found the original report by Kaiser Health News, which reported on the case in May (“Tourists, Beware: Foreign Visitors’ Travel Health Insurance Might Exclude Pandemics
”).

Vlastimil Gajdoš, a visitor from the Czech Republic, appealed to his own government after his travel insurance company gave notice they might not cover his bill for two weeks in Queens Hospital due to a “pandemic exclusion” in the policy’s fine print.

Gajdoš…reached out to the embassy and his employer for help after his travel insurer denied him coverage. The employer pledged to help him if his plan did not cover his hospital stay, he said, but the government intervention worked. The insurer ultimately agreed to cover Gajdoš’ expenses.

The couple would not disclose the final tally for Gajdoš’ hospital stay, but a typical 10-day course of treatment in an intensive care unit can run into several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He was discharged from the Queen’s Medical Center on April 8, grateful for the care. Gajdoš said his insurer’s actions caught him off guard. He intentionally purchased a more expensive policy with the expectation that they would receive help, not pushback, from the plan.

I suppose that’s news which might not be well received by the visitor industry as it has been promoting Hawaii as a relatively safe tourist destination.