Working Holiday In Taiwan & Health Insurance

When going to Taiwan on a working holiday, if you aren’t from the UK, you need to purchase health insurance for yourself during your stay which is a little bit annoying. In the case of Canada, they won’t issue you the visa unless you show them the proof of purchase of the travel health insurance.

If that doesn’t convince you to get insurance, check out my post on the Dangers of Taiwan.

The YouthTaiwan website has a nice graphic that outlines the most important information for Taiwan Working Holiday applicants.

taiwan working holiday-youth taiwan

Most of the requirements are rather straightforward, if not easy to get. The hard part is figuring out which insurance to go with because there are a lot of details and if you’re like me, you’ve never bought so much insurance. All the plans have numbers that are slightly different from the competition, which makes plans really hard to compare and the cost is not insignificant.

After doing a bit of research, I decided to go with Seven Corners‘s offering. During that time, I did go to the doctor a couple of times, but since I had a rather high deductible, I had to pay out of pocket. That cost me the equivalent of 10 USD each time. That was totally acceptable, because I saved a lot by having a higher deductible.

Later on, after talking with people in Taiwan, I figured out there were other options which were a little bit cheaper. When I have some time, I will go ahead and picked a couple of good options to share which are from reputable companies, so they should be more reliable, and cover enough.

I will also add a breakdown that explains insurance for you and Taiwanese health care numbers so that you know what insurance you should be getting.

 

Dangers of Taiwan

If you are like me and have spent most of your time in the western world, going to a tropical country like Taiwan is something new and exciting. At the same time, some things can be a bit scary for the uninitiated.

Before I went to Taiwan I was most afraid of :

  • The native poisonous snakes & killer bees (they have signs around here warning of this)
  • Tropical diseases. The two unusual ones are Dengue Fever & Japanese Encephalitis. At least there is no malaria or yellow fever here!
  • Typhoons / landslides
  • Earthquakes

Afterwards, I discovered these nasty surprises :

  • Getting hit by scooters / car in an accident or as a pedestrian. The roads are pretty chaotic here.
  • Poor enforcement of rules and infrastructure.
  • Some Flora have very sharp edges which can cut you. I wasn’t use to this, so I cut myself pretty badly one time while I was in the nature doing some river tracing.

This may all look scary but the odds of you being affected by any of this are quite low. Snakes rarely bite people, bees rarely chase people. The most dangerous thing by far is the vehicular traffic, but if you keep your eyes on the road, you should have great odds.

Interestingly, it’s a very dense country so when something bad happens, it feels like it happens close to you. You often get the feeling that Taiwanese are one big family.

Still, it’s advised to get health insurance when you come here, if your home country’s insurance doesn’t cover, as accidents do happen. Don’t put yourself in a position where you can’t afford medical care while abroad. In my case, insurance has been mostly to keep me from being too anxious about the bees and snakes!

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Greetings Travelers of The World

If you are reading this, you are probably interested in going abroad for an extended amount of time. I really encourage you to do so, and open yourself to new experiences! Living abroad allows you to see and compare how different peoples live and interact with each other. It gives a lot of perspective on how things work in your home country.

I’ve been always been interested in Chinese. After graduating, I decided to go to Taiwan to improve my Chinese and met my wife then-girlfriend there. Since then, I have been living in Taiwan going through different visa types over the years:

  • Student visa
  • Working holiday visa
  • Work visa
  • Resident visa for foreign spouses

There are definitely some pros / cons to living here and I’d like to share with you a bit of that. Even with my advanced Chinese level, I still learn things about Taiwan all the time!

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