TTPA Membership Now Includes CareFlite Coverage

An important way to support the trails you love to ride and walk on, is to join or renew your TTPA membership. If you’ve been on the fence about it, here’s a huge reason to join – Careflite coverage. That’s right. Starting in 2010, membership in TTPA includes coverage of Careflite. Our membership chair Pat Martin provided the following description of this new benefit to our members.

Trinity Trail Preservation Association
Membership Information

We have entered into an agreement with CareFlite to extend their emergency transportation benefits to our members. You may best know CareFlite from their helicopters air-lifting injured people from an accident scene to the nearest hospital that has the appropriate emergency care facility for their injury.

CareFlite (www.careflite.org) is a non-profit company sponsored by Baylor Health Care System, JPS Health Network, Methodist Health System, Parkland, and Texas Health Resources. They are authorized by the State of Texas to provide air ambulance services in Collin, Dallas, Denton, and Tarrant counties. If you are air-lifted by CareFlite and are not a member, it can be quite expensive – the bill can be thousands of dollars, most of which will not be covered by normal insurance policies. However, if you are a CareFlite member, any costs beyond what your insurance covers are absorbed by CareFlite. You pay nothing.

The CareFlite membership will cover you, and all members of your household for any type of emergency CareFlite is called in to handle, anywhere within 150 miles of DFW. It doesn’t matter if you or a family member is riding a horse, hiking a trail, in a car accident, shopping, or dining. If the local emergency responders call for CareFlite because of the nature of the accident or injury, you and your family are covered.

There are more benefits (such as Fixed Wing Air Ambulance within 500 miles of DFW), all explained in the CareFlite membership packet that will be mailed to you when you register with CareFlite as a TTPA member. But first you have to renew your membership with TTPA to receive the TTPA CareFlite membership application form.

From this time forward, TTPA memberships will be based on the calendar year, January thru December; regardless of what time of year you join. You can renew early for the next year, so send in your applications now for the 2010 TTPA membership. The TTPA CareFlite memberships will also be effective for the calendar year, January thru December. There are a few (not many) small-print-type exceptions: Medicaid recipients may not join CareFlite per Texas state laws, and CareFlite will discount the bill by 50%, not 100%, for people who do not have any insurance.

How to Join TTPA And Get CareFlite Coverage
The renewal/new membership process will be: you send in a completed TTPA membership form with the $35 TTPA annual membership fee. Pat Martin, our TTPA Secretary, in return will send you the TTPA CareFlite membership application form. You fill out that form and mail it directly to CareFlite. You do not send them any money, your CareFlite membership has already been paid by the TTPA. Your CareFlite benefits are in effect from the date of the postmark on your CareFlite application form if received after January 1. Business members will be able to apply the CareFlite benefits to one family associated with the business. If you have questions, please call or email any Board member and we’ll get the answer(s) for you

We, your Board, consider this to be a very beneficial benefit to being a TTPA member, and a very inexpensive form of insurance for what could be a catastrophic bill. The normal CareFlite membership for a household is $49 per year and doesn’t include a TTPA membership!