I read the regulation, and the word is not in it
Indonesia's remote worker visa does not require health insurance. Neither does the visa on arrival, the visit visa, or the Second Home route. This is worth stating hard, because the affiliate layer around Bali is thicker than almost anywhere and a great deal of it implies otherwise.
The governing instrument is Permenkumham No. 22 Tahun 2023, the Ministry of Law and Human Rights regulation on visas and stay permits. Searched end to end, the words asuransi and insurance do not appear in it once.
Article 63, the E33G remote worker provision, sets out the list: a national passport valid at least six months, evidence of immigration guarantee, proof of living costs for you and any family, a recent colour photograph, and documents explaining the purpose of your visit. Article 63(2) adds proof of salary or income of at least 60,000 US dollars a year. Article 63(3) adds a work contract with a company legally established outside Indonesia. The immigration department's own E33G page supplies the living-costs figure that the regulation delegates: three months of bank statements showing at least 2,000 US dollars.
That is the whole test. The stay permit runs one year, and the entry visa itself is valid 90 days from issuance. Official fees include 7,000,000 IDR for the one-year stay, 3,000,000 IDR for the ITAS, 500,000 IDR for the limited stay visa and 1,500,000 IDR for a re-entry permit.
One live discrepancy worth flagging rather than smoothing over. Almost every visa agent says the E33G cannot be extended and must be reapplied for from scratch. The immigration department's own page says the stay permit can be extended online through the e-visa portal. Those cannot both be true. Ask immigration, not an agent whose fee depends on the answer.
The rule that expired but never left the internet
There is a reason so many pages insist you need Indonesian insurance. There used to be a version of that rule. Requirements phrased as proof of insurance from an insurance company incorporated in Indonesia covering health financing still sit on some regional immigration office pages describing the retired B211 index.
That is legacy text on stale pages. The current national visa pages carry nothing of the kind. If someone tells you that you must buy from an Indonesian insurer to hold a KITAS, they are quoting a dead requirement.
The other zombie is the pandemic rule. Indonesia's COVID-era entry conditions ended with Task Force Circular No. 1 of 2023, signed on 9 June 2023. The 25,000 dollar COVID cover figure that still circulates has not applied for three years, and I could not locate a primary circular naming that amount even for the period when something applied.
BPJS, and the obligation nobody can resolve
Indonesia does have a compulsory health insurance law, and its application to nomads is genuinely unclear rather than merely undocumented.
Law 24 of 2011 requires every person, including foreigners who have worked at least six months in Indonesia, to participate in BPJS, reinforced by Presidential Regulation 82 of 2018. Contributions for the self-paying category run 150,000 IDR a month for Class 1, 100,000 for Class 2, and 42,000 less a 7,000 government subsidy for Class 3, still governed by Presidential Regulation 64 of 2020 and confirmed by BPJS as unchanged through April 2026.
The trigger is the word working. An E33G holder is contractually forbidden from working for Indonesian entities, and a Second Home holder does not work at all. Whether the obligation reaches either category has never been addressed by immigration or BPJS, and it is not enforced against them in practice. An employer-sponsored work KITAS is a different matter and is squarely in scope. Foreign registration cannot be done online: it takes a branch visit with your passport, KITAS, stay permit number, work or business permit, and bank book.
Even if you join, understand what you bought. BPJS covers the Indonesian public system. It does not cover an aircraft.
What Bali costs, from a published list
BIMC Hospital publishes prices, which makes it one of the few places in this region where I can give you real numbers rather than aggregator folklore.
An initial specialist consultation is 750,000 IDR, about 75 Australian dollars. An anaesthetist consultation is the same. An additional room night is 2,000,000 IDR, around 200 Australian dollars, and an ICU or high dependency night is 2,500,000 IDR, about 250. A pre-operative laboratory, ECG and radiology workup runs 2,000,000 to 4,000,000 IDR. Those figures come from BIMC's cosmetic surgery schedule, so read them as accurate bed, consultation and workup rates rather than as trauma pricing.
By international standards that is not frightening. A week on a ward in Bali does not bankrupt anyone. The exposure lies elsewhere.
The exposure is the aircraft
The UK Foreign Office says plainly that medical evacuation from Indonesia can cost tens of thousands of pounds, and adds that the standard of local medical care can be poor and that some medical tests cannot be performed reliably. That second sentence is the operative one: for a severe head injury or a complex trauma case, the question is not what Bali charges, it is whether Bali is where you should be at all.
BIMC confirms it arranges three evacuation modes, commercial carrier with a medical escort, air ambulance, and helicopter evacuation. It publishes no prices for any of them. I could not find a single air ambulance operator or government source that does, so the 20,000 to 50,000 dollar figures you see everywhere trace to insurance marketing, not to an invoice.
Also worth knowing before you need it: Australia's government states there is no reciprocal healthcare agreement with Indonesia, that it will not pay for emergency care or evacuation, and that hospitals require confirmation of insurance, a deposit, and a written guarantee of payment from next of kin before treating. A consulate can help arrange an evacuation. It will not fund one.
How the policy actually fails
The instructive Bali case is not someone uninsured. It is someone insured who was not covered.
Blake Gibb crashed a motorbike on Nusa Lembongan, sustained skull fractures and a traumatic brain injury, was treated at BIMC and flown to Australia, with the bill reported at around 370,000 to 400,000 Australian dollars. His insurance was reported void over an unpaid 7 dollar add-on. That account is from news reporting rather than a court record, so hold it loosely, but the shape of it is exactly right and it repeats constantly in a place where everyone rides a scooter.
The realistic Bali failure mode is an exclusion, not an absence: no motorbike licence, no helmet, alcohol involved, an unselected add-on. Read that section of your policy before you read the price.
What to buy
Buy for the flight. The number to compare is the medical evacuation limit, not the headline maximum, and it should be six figures. Then confirm your policy covers riding a motorbike with the licence you actually hold.
Layer local cover underneath it if you are staying: BPJS at 150,000 IDR a month, or an OJK-licensed private plan, gets you into Indonesian hospitals cheaply. Just never let it be the only thing you own.
The visa page covers the E33G and Second Home routes in full, and Canggu is where most of this actually happens.