Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Insurance requirement for traveling into Thailand. For those who are unaware, let's go ahead and get some disambiguation out of the way here. First we are not talking about Retirement Insurance, we are talking about the basic travel insurance everyone, or virtually everyone has to obtain in order to travel into Thailand, in order to be approved for a Thailand Pass and/or a Visa in order to travel into Thailand and presently that requirement is 20,000 US$ coverage of travel insurance, so-called COVID insurance. We have discussed this a lot. That has come down recently. It was up at 50,000 now it is down to 20,000. Hopefully we will see it reduced down to nothing sooner rather than later. I thought it was worth noting this. We have discussed this in other videos but I don't know if a fine enough point was put on this.

I thought of this while reading recent article from the Thai Enquirer, that is thaienquirer.com, the article is titled: Government Announces New Entry Regulations quoting directly: "Foreigners who do not have a Social Security number or confirmation of employment in Thailand will also require insurance with coverage of up to 20,000US$ for medical expenses." So you kind of have to invert this to understand what's going on here. There is a lot of information in this article by the way. This is a tiny little excerpt. I urge those who are watching this video go check out that article. The point we are trying to make here, let's go through this again: "foreigners who do not have a Social Security number or confirmation of employment in Thailand will also require insurance with coverage up to 20,000USD for medical expenses.” So the implication there is if you invert that, if you have a Social Security number or confirmation of employment in Thailand, you do not require the travel insurance. We have seen this, we have discussed this in other videos. If you are work authorized if you have a Work Permit in Thailand or work authorization in the form of a WP3, or as this notes and/or Social Security coverage and there are retirees who worked in Thailand even Foreign ones that may have Social Security coverage that worked long enough, depending on their circumstances they may be covered by Social Security and again that is going to be very fact dependent, but yeah there are folks that do not need to get this insurance. Again Work Permit holders, folks who worked in Thailand that are foreign that may not have work authorization now. They may be retired but they worked long enough to vest themselves in the Thai Social Security system, insurance requirements may not apply to those folks. 

So something to bear in mind. Another major benefit of a Work Permit in Thailand is the fact that yeah, you are exempted from the need to do this Travel Insurance to come into Thailand. So definitely something to ponder for those who are looking to come to Thailand, especially those who are looking to stay in Thailand long-term.