Specialist medical travel insurance - do you all travel on the same policy?

[Justusethebloodyphone]

I have to get a specialist travel insurance policy this year due to upcoming surgery. It’s so expensive to put us all on the same policy. It’s actually more than the cost of mine x 5 (family of 5).

Do you normally just get a standard policy for the rest of the family? Would this mean if I needed a hospital stay (highly unlikely but that’s what insurance is for) they wouldn’t be able to claim anything for changes in travel dates/plans once travelling?

It includes the US so prices are very high.

Going on the same policy makes it easier if you have to cancel or make a medical claim while away as they will pay out for you all (ours does and this was the reasoning behind us having one policy). If you have separate and you have to cancel they may only pay out for you. It depends on policy wording so you'd need to check. Some policies only allow one person to stay with the person in hospital and the rest need to return home.

My ds has to have specialist insurance and we went to the US last year as a family. It wasn't much more for the full family to be added and it was cheaper for a yearly policy than single trip.

We have a general annual family one with our bank account but DH normally travels under the his company travel insurance (he can use privately as well) as he has several pre-existing conditions which makes it really expensive to upgrade ours every time.

The only issue I can see is that if we would have one incident health wise where we all would be impacted at the same time. That hasn't happened so far and we currently do European holidays where the GHIC/EHIC worked for the odd GP visit we needed.
Next year SE Asia - we need to see what works best.