I seem to remember receiving an actual green card from my insurance company back in the pre EU days when I told them I wanted to travel abroad. "Abroad" in this context meant anywhere outside the UK.
On it there was a list of countries and those I was not going to travel to were crossed out. The point of the card was that it wasn't an insurance policy in its own right but a foreign extension of my UK policy. You couldn't buy a green card on its own, it could only extend an existing UK policy. Sometimes I had to pay extra for it, sometimes not.
These days my UK policy has to cover basic EU travel (or a subset of EU countries anyway) so I don't need anything green any more but the name seems to have stuck.
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