Giving birth in Malaysia: what insurance will not do

This page exists to say the thing clearly rather than after the fact.

The Regency Assurance general exclusions include pregnancy, terminations, complications, antenatal care, midwifery, delivery and postnatal care. It is not a question of choosing a higher tier — the exclusion runs across the products, and complications are named alongside routine care.

That is standard for international health insurance in this market. Maternity, where it is available at all, is usually a separate product or a rider carrying a waiting period measured in months before conception. Arranging cover once a pregnancy is known is too late by design.

Malaysia has a genuinely good two-tier system — a heavily subsidised public sector and a large private one. The subsidy is for citizens.

Foreigners are charged at foreigner rates in public facilities, and in practice most expatriates use private hospitals, which is where maternity care for foreign residents generally happens. We have set out how the two tiers work and what private treatment costs on separate pages rather than restating them here.

The exact maternity package price is a question for the hospital rather than for us — Malaysia's regulated professional-fee schedule covers doctors' fees in private hospitals but not accommodation, nursing, theatre use or drugs, so a quoted package is the only reliable number and it comes from the hospital's own maternity department.

A short list, in the order it bites:

• Ask about maternity before buying any policy, including ours. If it matters, it changes which product you should be looking at entirely.
• Get a written package quote from the hospital's maternity department, and ask what is excluded from it — a caesarean, a longer stay, or neonatal care are the usual variances.
• Check what happens to the baby. Cover for a newborn is not automatic; a child is added as a named dependant, and the terms for that are separate from the birth itself.
• Register the birth locally first. The Malaysian registration produces the certificate everything else depends on; any consular registration with your own country comes after it.

Source: GOV.UK — Register a birth abroad

To be clear about scope, and this is the important one on this page: we cannot help with maternity. Pregnancy, antenatal care, midwifery, delivery and postnatal care are all excluded under the Regency Assurance policy wording, on every plan. We would rather say that here than let you find out later.

What we can introduce is international health and life cover for everything that is not maternity, for you and in due course for a child as a named dependant. Pre-existing conditions are excluded.