Did you know that 80% of US health insurance companies do not cover travel vaccinations? Also, travel clinics usually charge over $200 per person (not family) to review medical records and tell you what vaccines you might need for international travel. $1,000 for this review was not in our budget.
I used the CDC website to cross-reference their recommendations with our itinerary and created our travel vaccine schedule for our family. My plan was reviewed (and given two thumbs up) by a travel consultant from a local pharmacy that administers all these vaccines. Our GP couldn’t give us most of these vaccines. Our choices were: this one pharmacy, the UW travel clinic, or the Department of Health.
Pedja and I received 7 vaccines (4 of which were multiple doses over 2-3 months), and the kids received 5 (also over 2-3 months).
In these photos taken back in October of 2018, we are filling out almost two hours’ worth of paperwork to get set up for all those vaccines. Without insurance, this would have been $11,000 bill.
Read that again ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.
US healthcare costs are (not surprisingly) outrageous (but that’s another topic for another day).
We were super lucky that our insurance was in that 20% that covered travel vaccinations (until December, so we had to make sure we finished them all by then). Tight budget, CDC website, spreadsheet, and a strict family schedule, and we got it all done for $400.
Planning for this trip required covering tons of these details, each one extensive in its way. I’ll sprinkle some of these learnings throughout this week until I get my act together to post something current from Buenos Aires.
P.S. Here is the list of vaccines that we got. Pedja and I decided to repeat our Hep A and B (2-3x). We couldn’t find any records of them before. The rest of the vaccines were the same for all 5 of us: yellow fever (2x), cholera, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, and rabies (3x). None of us had any reactions to them (Pedja’s arm got itchy after yellow fever, but that’s about it).
Refresh Journey 