What is Health Insurance?
Health insurance is a type of insurance whereby the insurer pays the medical costs of the insured if the insured becomes sick or injured due to covered causes, or due to accidents. The insurer may be a private insurance company or a government agency. The insurance may pay for medicine, visits to the doctor, hospital stays, other medical expenses and loss of earnings, depending on the conditions covered and the benefits and choices of treatment available on the policy.
Why Health Insurance is needed?
A medical emergency / crisis can strike at any time. It can be in nature of an accident or any any disease/ illness. With present life style of stress, traveling, long working hours, irregular and unhealthy eating habits, makes us very susceptible to illnesses. Often such medical emergencies are unforeseen and may cause great financial crisis to you. Very often, existing savings, future family goals are compromised to arrange for such medical expenses. Taking an adequate medical and health insurance would help you cover your cost of treatment and hospitalisation, other medical expenses and may reimburse you for your lost income during period of recovery. Health insurance is your safeguard against financial impact and stress that accompanies any illness or accident.
How much Health Insurance to take?
How much health coverage you need is not an easy question. Is Rs.1 Lac or Rs.5 Lac sufficient? Its difficult to answer specially since one is not aware as to what and when a medical emergency may arise in future. But when major illnesses happens, it surely does cost a lot. The amount of coverage should be adequate such that you do not need to use your savings and compromise on your monthly expenses or any future goals. And must be sufficient enough to cover for good medical treatment and hospitalization period. One way of arriving at the cover is find the maximum health cover that you can afford after covering for major illnesses, more likely to happen. We advise you to contact your certified insurance advisor to guide you on taking appropriate health insurance cover...
Health Insurance products available in the market
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Individual Policies : Individual health insurance is policy that a person buys on his own, and not that he avails because of his employer taking policy for all employees of the organization or as part of a group. Individual health insurance policy can be bought by a person for himself as per his requirements. A health insurance cover for a single insured person. The insured (only) can avail the benefits up to the predetermined sum insured.
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Floater Policies : A health insurance cover for the entire family including spouse, dependent parents and children. The sum insured for the entire family is predetermined. Whenever there is a medical claim for any of the family members, the claim is made from that total sum insured. For e.g., there is a family floater policy with sum insured of Rs. 5 Lakh. One member in the family is hospitalized, uses about Rs. 2 lakh for his treatment, the remaining 3 lakh can be availed by other family members. Hence the family floater serves the purpose whoever in the family falls ill.
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Group Policies : Persons having some similarity (working in the same organization, same occupation, etc.) form a group and the health insurance company collectively insures the group. Group insurance policies are very popular with organizations where they form a group of all the employees and get them collectively insured where each member is then insured for a particular risk cover amount. The premium that is paid per person is far less than the premium of an individual policy.