Yes you can get cover for some pre existing conditions but I don't believe that would cover the cost of the provision of oxygen
I wasn't suggesting that. As you say, the need for the O2 is a cert, there is nothing to insure in that respect.
The reason I brought up insurance was that the original article stated that the child would have upto 10 seizures per day. That also vritually guarantees there will be one on the flight. I wonder what procedure is to deal with that?
I then said that there was still a very high chance that the condition could deteriorate and that this might need additional and urgent medical help. It was the potential cost of this divert that KLM might claim from the insurance company, not the O2 cost.
BBC article says:
According to the family, they had expected to be charged £330, but Dutch airline KLM doubled this amount a week before they were due to leave.
This implies they did know O2 was chargeable.
A week before Friday's flight, he said the cost had been doubled as KLM considered the journey from Birmingham to Curacao, via Amsterdam, as two flights in each direction
I might have expected this from my local bus company, but not for an airline offering a through ticket. I had also assumed that the cost of €660 was due to a fairly sizeable quantity of O2 being needed. Now it turns out that they are actually charging per sector. KLM should have known this as soon as they got a booking reference number. And why on earth would a British family otherwise fly to CUR from AMS without a connection? Sure - as a cheapskate APD avoider I'll do it, but not for a complex journey like this.
"It's not the fact that we can't afford it, it's just the principle of paying 800 euros for something that's potentially going to keep my daughter alive," he added.
Just as I am starting to think that KLM have done a
PR boob, we get back to this kind of talk.
Either they have done their research and they know it is chargeable or they haven't, in which case tough. Point the finger at being given the wrong info about the costs, but there seems to be a lot of having cake and eating it going on.
Presumably they are expecting free food when they arrive in Curacao - after all that will keep the three of them alive will it not?
family receives oxygen bill
When I was first scanning this, I was thinking either KLM had backtracked or a donor had stepped forward to fund the difference.
At the end of the day, it is a moving story, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone out there (and out of millions of paper readers it would only have taken one), someone came up with the cash.
I'm afraid that I'm just a little more cynical than that. My local quite often has this kind of fundraising event, and it is easy to ask why treatments like this can't be provided on the NHS.
Sadly, anything provided by government, or indeed by private company has to conform to some form of cost and benefit equation.
I guess we're always going to be cynics on pprune because we need to think with our heads all the time not our hearts.
Assuming that have gone, I hope it works out