Medical emergency can happen to you anytime. To deal with this situation, people nowadays buy health insurance. Take Insurance policy or Mediclaim Policy plan. With a health policy, timely and adequate treatment is possible for the family members. Besides this, one gets relief from huge expenses incurred on hospital.
Reasons to choose a critical illness insurance policy
There are many things in life over which you have no control. Health is one of those things. You can work towards fitness and a healthy life but it is almost impossible to achieve complete control.
In such a situation, it is good to be prepared with a health insurance policy that provides coverage for your medical and other expenses in case of illness. Now one thing may come to your mind that if I already have a health insurance cover, should I buy a separate critical illness policy ?
The simple answer is that it is advisable to do so. Even if you purchase the best medical insurance policy to meet your health coverage needs, you may still find yourself lacking adequate coverage after being diagnosed with a serious illness. In primary health insurance cover, you do not get adequate coverage for out-of-hospital expenses in case of life-threatening diseases like paralysis, stroke and cancer.
The increase in medical expenses is another aspect that needs to be taken into consideration. We have seen a huge increase in the costs and expenses associated with medical treatment in the last few years. You must have noticed that in the beginning and middle of the pandemic, there was an increase in medical expenses due to lack of care or treatment. We all know the results. This shows that you can never be too sure about anything.
In case of serious illness, primary health care plans may prove inadequate due to high cost of medical and other expenses.
You should also choose critical illness cover for these reasons:
Covers medical expenses and other treatment related expenses: Treatment of serious diseases like cancer or HIV is very expensive. An insurance policy covering such illnesses makes it easier to manage the high expenses associated with consultation and hospitalization.
Compensation for loss of income :
After being diagnosed with a fatal disease, any person naturally goes for treatment. When you are suffering from any illness, your expenses keep increasing and your savings get affected the most by it. Many times people are not in a position to do physical hard work and due to this their source of income is also lost. In such a situation, critical illness cover can prove to be very helpful.
Help in meeting other monthly expenses :
As a working professional, you may have certain responsibilities and liabilities. The impact on your health and income is negatively reflected in liabilities like loan repayment. The fixed payout under the critical insurance cover will allow you to meet these monthly expenses without any additional burden.
Providing additional support beyond the health plan :
Critical insurance cover provides you with additional financial support beyond the primary health insurance cover. Apart from these, it also covers many other diseases which are not covered in the basic mediclaim policy. Thus, critical illness cover helps you deal with such medical expenses and other types of rising expenses.
Pay Affordable Premium :
It is a common misconception that critical illness insurance is out of the range of most people. The biggest reason for this misunderstanding is the misinformation that one has to pay huge premiums to get this type of cover. However, this is not true. With the advancement in technology and rational regulatory control by the government, critical insurance policies are now easily accessible to everyone and that too at very affordable rates.
Types of Critical Illness
Cover Generally, every insurance company offers critical insurance policies in its own way. We can broadly divide it into two categories
Bundle cover : This is an insurance cover that you can choose for coverage against many types of serious diseases. Typically bundled cover covers 9, 25 or 43 conditions.
For a specific disease As the name suggests, in this type of policy you can choose coverage against diseases like cancer, HIV or kidney failure. The benefits of the policy are the same in both the cases.
These things should be kept in mind while buying a critical illness insurance policy
What is covered and what is not: It is important for you to check what is covered in the insurance policy and what is not included in it. While signing the insurance policy document, you need to keep an eye on which diseases are covered under the policy and what kind of charges are excluded from the coverage.
Renewal: All such insurance policies have a term of one to three years. After this they need to be renewed. Companies offering insurance policies covering critical illnesses sometimes set a limit that the policy cannot be renewed after a certain age. In such a situation, experts advise that it is very important to check this particular limit while purchasing any plan.
Sub-limits: To reach any decision about purchasing an insurance policy, you should also look at the sub-limits of the insurance plan. There are generally sub-limits for medical tests and surgeries. It is important to consider these things to determine how much coverage you are actually getting for a particular expense.
Sum Assured: What amount of cover would be a good cover? Determining a figure for this can be a difficult task. Experts recommend taking a higher cover amount to reduce the financial burden in case of emergency.