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Thai Retirement Visa Insurance: What about TRICARE?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Retirement Visas specifically Insurance in the context of Thai Retirement Visas and TRICARE. 

First of all those who are watching this video with great interest are very well aware of what TRICARE is. Those who are watching this video who do not know what TRICARE is, this video may not be particularly useful to you. 

To sum it up, TRICARE is basically Insurance that is granted to veterans of the United States military services and those who put in the requisite amount of time in the service may be granted TRICARE benefits for life in many cases. TRICARE is very much a benefit to veterans and to former service personnel who are living both in the United States and abroad as it generally speaking will cover folks' medical needs on an as-needed basis. 

With respect to the Thai Insurance scheme, TRICARE has come up a lot in a lot of correspondence I received from various friends as well as clients; people who view this channel. TRICARE seems to be on the minds of many and what I can say with this video is I am not totally certain of how exactly TRICARE is going to play into this but take this away from this video. Put your minds at ease. I do believe that ultimately TRICARE is going to be worked into the insurance scheme if you will, the insurance infrastructure of the Retirement Visa scheme as we are seeing it unfold. I think TRICARE has a place there. Exactly how it is going to interact remains to be fully seen but we have talked to individuals who are within the Immigration inspectorate and TRICARE is going to be something that unlike other types of insurance that one may have, TRICARE is rather uniform insofar as it is coverage; it just is what it is and there are far more people that use it so the system is going to interact with it a lot more than for example a policy that only one person in the entire system has, a policy from their home country, whatever. TRICARE is a little different because the system is going to deal with it more frequently and when bureaucracy deals with an issue on a frequent basis it tends to form an overarching policy thereby creating sort of a streamlining of processing with respect to how to deal with it. That being said, exactly how they are going to deal with it remains to be seen. Folks that we have talked to at Immigration have basically explained to us that "Yes, we understand TRICARE is out there." Those folks who are already in extension status and who may fall into being discretionarily, for lack of a better term, exempted from the insurance moving forward because they were already in the system prior to October 31st, 2019, I think TRICARE provides further evidence that that person should be discretionarily allowed to maintain their status because they really are covered.  Now the thing with TRICARE is TRICARE basically reimburses. It doesn't exactly pay out directly so this creates some issues with respect to how exactly it is going to be viewed by Immigration moving forward. That being said, I have been told on good authority that there are going to be ways in which to incorporate TRICARE coverage into one's Retirement Visa scheme and into one's Retirement Visa plans for Thailand. Immigration and the insurance apparatus now evolving around it does have a means and methodology for incorporating TRICARE, if you want to call it that. As I said, it may fall into sort of a discretionary thing where folks who already have their extensions and also have TRICARE may just be able to continue on as they did. There are also I believe solutions being created as we speak to basically incorporate TRICARE coverage into the overall system and thereby allow people to remain a Retirement Visa status here in the Kingdom notwithstanding insurance requirements

That being stated, how exactly this is going to work remains to be seen. Those who are interested in this, it is probably a good idea to contact a competent professional to go ahead and ascertain where one stands with respect to Retirement Visa especially as it pertains to TRICARE.