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Our Experience Without Travel Insurance, and What We Have Learned

When Diana first fell into a coma after her subdural hematoma one of our hindsight regrets was not having purchased travel insurance. In a study by AAA, only 38% of Americans plan to or have purchased travel insurance for international flights. Our family has had little experience with international travel. Diana’s ticket was purchased by a family friend to bring her out to Portugal for a visit. Often, it is during the process of booking a ticket where travel insurance is purchased, their coverage can be decent, but at times more expensive than purchasing it separately, and with fewer options than what can be acquired through a more tailored plan.

Since she fell into a coma we have researched deeply into travel insurance to see how it could have helped us, and to help others avoid the same situation. With the most expensive problem, international air medical repatriation, there seems to be only 2 specialized options that would have helped. However, We do want to highlight where general travel medical insurance would have been valuable to us. In this post, we will explore the different options for travel insurance, and where it would have had the most impact in our situation.

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Air Travel and the Air Carrier Access Act

Original Link | Metropolitan Airport News

Julia Lauria-Blum | BY JULIA LAURIA-BLUM | NOVEMBER 14, 2022 | 14 MINS READ

Accessible Services at New York Airports

This October, the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 (ACAA) celebrated its 36th anniversary. The ACAA (Public Law 99–435) prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in commercial air transportation. Airlines are required to provide passengers with disabilities with many types of assistance, including wheelchair or other guided assistance to board, deplane, or connect to another flight, and seating accommodation assistance that meets passenger’s disability-related needs, as well as assistance with the loading and stowing of assistive devices. After a lengthy rulemaking process that included regulatory negotiations involving representatives of the disability community and the airline industry, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) issued a final ACAA rule in March 1990, which has been amended 15 times by the USDOT to further improve access to transportation facilities and services.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 61 million adults in the U.S. live with a disability, which includes impairment in mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, independent living, and self-care. 

Air travel for people with disabilities can be exceptionally challenging if airport facilities are not accessible and reasonable accommodations are not made, as in the most recent amendment to the Air Carrier Access Amendments Act (ACAA) of 2021. This bill expands provisions prohibiting discrimination against disabled individuals by an air carrier. Specifically, it lists certain actions that an air carrier must take or may not take concerning a disabled individual. Despite these amendments, people with disabilities, including veterans, continue to experience significant barriers with traveling in air transportation, such as damaged assistive devices; inaccessible aircraft, lavatories, communication media, delayed assistance; the treatment of service animals, inadequate disability cultural competency, and a lack of suitable seating accommodations.

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