If you've searched Google for private medical insurance that covers expats in the Bahamas then you are most likely for looking for established UK based health insurance providers that will cover your medical costs in the Bahamas.
Living as an expatriate in the Bahamas you want to avoid any nasty unexpected medical costs. In some countries these can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds for serious conditions.
Our advice when shopping around for health insurance that covers expatriates living in the Bahamas is to speak to a insurance broker. Health insurance is very complex and if you want absolute certainty that the Bahamas is covered you should talk with a medical insurance broker who can explain which providers will cover medical expenses for expatriates in the Bahamas and which will not.
There are many advantages to using a broker but the biggest by far is that you're using their expertise at no cost. They are paid by the insurer (Aviva or Bupa etc) rather than by you so it costs you no extra to use their brokering services.
- Do you live in many different postcodes? Some will give you a cheaper premium than offers. A insurance broker will be able to advise whats best.
- Do you have a hobby that may invalidate your insurance policy? A broker will know this critical information.
- If you are a couple and one of you has claimed on your policy this year would it be cheaper to separate you both onto two different insurance policies?
- You've lean't you're at risk of developing a certain condition and want to know which policy provider offers the largest amount of cover for it. A broker will know this instantly saving you so much time and effort.
You can call around every health insurance provider you can find and ask if they provider cover for expats in the Bahamas, however this will be a very time consuming process. Each insurer will ask for your medical history because its not normally a simple yes or not if a medical condition is covered or not.
Its much quicker to speak to one health insurance broker which will know which policy providers on the market offer cover for expats in the Bahamas and under what conditions they do or don't cover it.
The Bahamas Information
The Bahamas (/bəˈhɑːməz/ (listen)), known officially as the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Atlantic. It takes up 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and is home to 88% of the archipelago's population. The archipelagic state consists of more than 700 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, and is located north of Cuba and northwest of the island of Hispaniola (split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the American state of Florida, and east of the Florida Keys. The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes The Bahamas' territory as encompassing 470,000 km2 (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space.
The Bahama Islands were inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno, for many centuries. Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the 'New World' in 1492. Later, the Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to and enslaved them on Hispaniola, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, when English colonists from Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera.
The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to The Bahamas; they took enslaved people with them and established plantations on land grants. African enslaved people and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in The Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Subsequently, The Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to The Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognise the freedom of enslaved people carried by the ships of other nations which reached The Bahamas. Today Afro-Bahamians make up 90% of the population of 332,634.
The country gained governmental independence in 1973 led by Sir Lynden O. Pindling, with Elizabeth II as its queen. In terms of gross domestic product per capita, The Bahamas is one of the richest countries in the Americas (following the United States and Canada), with an economy based on tourism and offshore finance.
The name Bahamas is most likely derived from either the Taíno ba ha ma ("big upper middle land"), which was a term for the region used by the indigenous people, or possibly from the Spanish baja mar ("shallow water or sea" or "low tide") reflecting the shallow waters of the area. Alternatively, it may originate from Guanahani, a local name of unclear meaning.
The word The constitutes an integral part of the short form of the name and is, therefore, capitalised. The Constitution of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, the country's fundamental law, capitalises the "T" in "The Bahamas".
The first inhabitants of The Bahamas were the Taino people, who moved into the uninhabited southern islands from Hispaniola and Cuba around the 800s–1000s AD, having migrated there from South America; they came to be known as the Lucayan people. An estimated 30,000 Lucayans inhabited The Bahamas at the time of Christopher Columbus's arrival in 1492.
Columbus's first landfall in what was to Europeans a 'New World' was on an island he named San Salvador (known to the Lucayans as Guanahani). Whilst there is a general consensus that this island lay within The Bahamas, precisely which island Columbus landed on is a matter of scholarly debate. Some researchers believe the site to be present-day San Salvador Island (formerly known as Watling's Island), situated in the southeastern Bahamas, whilst an alternative theory holds that Columbus landed to the southeast on Samana Cay, according to calculations made in 1986 by National Geographic writer and editor Joseph Judge, based on Columbus's log. On the landfall island, Columbus made first contact with the Lucayans and exchanged goods with them, claiming the islands for the Crown of Castile, before proceeding to explore the larger isles of the Greater Antilles.
The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas theoretically divided the new territories between the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Portugal, placing The Bahamas in the Spanish sphere; however they did little to press their claim on the ground. The Spanish did however exploit the native Lucayan peoples, many of whom were enslaved and sent to Hispaniola for use as forced labour. The slaves suffered harsh conditions and most died from contracting diseases to which they had no immunity; half of the Taino died from smallpox alone. As a result of these depredations the population of The Bahamas was severely diminished.