WARNING to all travelers considering using Allianz Global Assistance for an AA flight.

We recently had a flight to Rio booked where we were recommended to purchase trip insurance through Allianz Global Assistance and were told that for ANY medical event which led to cancelation, this would give us a full refund.

Unfortunately a few weeks before the flight my wife did require a trip to an OBGYN specialist and her Provider restricted her from all travel for 8-12 weeks (which fell right in the middle of the trip). We got supporting documentation from the clinic including a SIGNED letter from the Provider confirming he was restricting her from travel. He acknowledged that he was not comfortable release private patient information to an agency or outside organization who is NOT rendering medical care to the patient, and that any such act would result in a violation of the HIPAA patient privacy rights we are afforded in America. Unfortunately the folks at Allianz Global Assistance are not educated in the ways of privacy acts and said they have a firm policy for a policy holding patient to disclose the entire personal and private medical records release from the providers (and then asked for it in a NON-SECURE and non-encrypted manner for that matter! Another clear violation of the law). An employee there speaking on anonymity on the situation disclosed that they are instructed to just reject all claims and that they are only looked into if the customer files an appeal (and even ten he said they are audited and measured by the amount of claims they are able to reject). You all will have much better luck getting the airline to waive the cancelation policy in a circumstance like this (at least they don't flat out disregard the customers privacy rights) then you would be going through a 3rd party vendor like this who measures bottom lines and fiscal year profit reports on policy purchases vs adjudicated claims. We have traveled the world and have close to 1 million miles with both American and United, and never in a million years would I recommend any travel utilizing a company Allianz Global. (and for that matter, I would recommend another Airline since AA still elects to send their customers to a group like this).