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Thai Special Tourist and O-A Retirement Visa Insurance Look Alike

Transcript of the above video:

When combing through the sort of "catacombs of the internet" regarding Thai Immigration information and if you think that sounds as fun as me saying it sounds, think again. No it is not the most fun thing in the world albeit we do spend a lot of time looking into what is going on with respect to Thai Immigration. 

In a recent article from the Phuket News, that is thephuketnews.com, certainly stood out. The article is titled: Special Tourist Visa Health Insurance Falls to 40,000 Baht Outpatient, 400,000 Baht Inpatient. Quoting directly: "The health insurance requirement for tourists entering Thailand under the new Special Tourist Visa has fallen to a minimum of 40,000 coverage for outpatient treatment and not less than 400,000 Baht in case of inpatient treatment." If that sounds familiar it probably should because it sounds an awful lot like the insurance requirements for O-A Visa holders, that is retirees here in Thailand in the OA category. It certainly appears that these Visa schemes are very much in alignment. 

Now I made another video positing the question: "Is the Special Tourist Visa being designed to sort of replace the Retirement Visa?" No, I do not think that is the case. However, I do believe that long-term, insurance is going to more and more be a requirement for multiple visa categories and I think it may even spread out past even O-A, out to for example O Marriage Visas. I think it could even possibly go to Business Visas at one point although I don't think that is going to happen anytime in the foreseeable future, especially in the context of Business Visas, there are other concerns. Most of the time there is sort of Corporate Insurance associated with the Business Visa in Thailand or depending on one's occupation, they may actually already be covered under Social Security here in Thailand. So again, that is going to be very factually dependent and that is really not the scope of this video but I thought it was noteworthy that the Special Tourist Visa schemes insurance component, looks very much akin to the O-A Retirement Visa Insurance component and that I definitely felt was something that should be brought up in a video on this channel.