Are you wise enough to buy an insurance policy?

Kunal Parashar* (34) was thrilled with his life till two years ago. He had a high paying job that let him travel all over the world, a loving family and his own two bedroom house in Mumbai. “I thought my life was set, that I could retire in a few years and enjoy my family time. I was thoroughly unprepared for a sudden reversal of fortunes.”

Kunal was detected with a brain tumour after he complained of fatigue, memory lapses and severe headaches. “I thought it was related to the stress of my job. I took up yoga, sleeping on time and eating only home cooked food, but the symptoms remained. Finally, a round of blood tests and an MRI confirmed the prognosis,” he remembers. “But I was nonchalant about the surgery, since I had company health insurance. Imagine my shock when I realised that it would cover only a small part of my treatment!”

The decision to not take health insurance on time hit the family hard, as it grappled with Kunal’s treatment costs. “I had to give up my job because I needed long periods of time to recuperate. The tumour was a malignant one, which means that the cancer can recur any time. My savings were completely wiped out, and I am now contemplating selling my house to make some money available for my treatment,” he rues.

Don’t let your life’s story pan out like Kunal’s – invest in health insurance policies that cover the gamut of future medical and life expenses. It is one thing to not know if one has an underlying medical condition or if one is about to meet with an accident. But it is quite another to wilfully not prepare oneself for it with health insurance plans.

“My father met with an accident last year, and he was in hospital for a month,” says Ravi Mhatre* (33), Pune resident. “Thank God my wife had been urging me to take health insurance for months. I have a family health plan that paid for my father’s hospitalisation and treatment. I shudder to think what would have happened without insurance. I would be forced to borrow money from friends,” he says.

The good news is that health insurance in India is growing steadily, with many health insurance companies like Max Bupa offering excellent individual and family plans. These plans cover the gamut of medical treatments costs and also offer cashless hospitalisation cover. Other features include critical illness cover, daily hospital cash benefit and costs for diagnostic tests.  

Myths about health insurance

You may harbour certain myths about health insurance, and these myths will prevent you from getting insurance. Dispel these wrong notions today.

In times of increasing illness and stress, every person needs sufficient health insurance for himself and his loved ones. Despite knowing the benefits of health insurance policies, however, people take insufficient health cover so that they have to pay lower premiums. The fallacy of this thinking becomes apparent when one meets with a serious accident or dies, and the family has to bear the brunt of huge medical expenses without health insurance.

Here are 5 myths associated with health insurance that one should dispel at the earliest:

1. The only benefit of health insurance is for tax rebates.

Many people erroneously believe that buying health insurance policies will give them tax benefits. Hence, they buy a policy based on how much rebate they can get in every financial year. One needs to purchase health insurance plans for future security, not tax rebates. Hence, it is important to buy a policy that gives sufficient coverage and several benefits to the whole family.

2. You are ineligible for health insurance if you have a disease.

This is completely false. You may have to pay a higher premium, and you can claim insurance money for treatment of your disease only after a certain time period has elapsed. However, all health insurance policies in India come with a pre-existing disease clause; the benefits of the policy will fructify later than others. It is permissible to take the best health insurance despite a pre-existing disease, however, certain conditions are to be met.

3. You cannot get health insurance if you are not admitted to hospital.

This used to be true earlier in India. Today, however, health insurance in India is growing steadily and insurance providers are making sure that customers receive the benefits of insurance without or without hospitalisation. Health insurance policies today cover even pre-hospitalisation medical expenses as well as post-operative care and therapy. Some insurance policies also give the policy holder a daily allowance during hospital stay, while others also pay for OPD expenses.

4. Health insurance is only for ‘serious’ causes.

This is absolutely untrue. Many people are stunned to discover that health insurance can cover OPD expenses, give daily cash allowance, pay for minor surgery and even cover the expenses of maternity and pregnancy check-ups. However, one must check the conditions of the policy for coverage, as also the time that needs to elapse for claiming benefits after the policy is activated.

5. Cashless insurance is available everywhere.

To avail of the cashless insurance benefit, the hospital treating the patient MUST be connected to the cashless treatment network. One cannot expect this benefit from every hospital. Conversely, one must include the treating hospital in the hospital reimbursement claim to avail of the insurance money.

6 easy steps to get accidental insurance

Preparing for the traumas of an accident proves to be beneficial in the long run.

An accident occurs out of the blue and changes your life forever. There is never a chance to prepare yourself for the physical or financial impact of an accident. However, the worst is yet to come, when a person is ill-equipped to take care of the expenses related to an accident.

India is waking up to the perils of not having adequate accidental insurance. No accident insurance during such a traumatic episode can wipe out the family savings. Instead, preparing for this eventuality with a good accident insurance policy will not just give one peace of mind every night, but also take care of loved ones when the policy holder dies as a result of an accident.

A personal accident insurance policy takes care of the expenses associated with treatment, hospitalization and post-operative therapy. With these major expense heads taken care, there is no need to touch the family savings or sell off any assets to raise money.

Here are 6 steps to get accidental insurance online:

1. Do your research. Based on your needs from the accident insurance policy, you must jot down the features you are looking at, apart from the sum assured. You can go online to check the various accident insurance policies being offered by various insurance providers to arrive at a desired plan.

2. Choose the personal accident policy. Once you have a fair idea of which personal accident insurance policy you want, you should get details about it online. The insurance provider of that policy will have put up a detailed description of the policy’s features, benefits and clauses. If you still want more information, request a call back or use a chat online option if provided.

3. Get all the information. The insurance provider will have put up information about the policy’s features and benefits, as well as any variants of the policy. Gather all the details and calculate your outgoing for it in terms of premiums. Look for such features as cover for partial or complete disability, temporary or permanent disability, child education benefit (in case of policy holder’s death) and funeral expenses. The policy should cover the entire family.

4. Calculate the numbers. Use the site’s online calculation tool to exactly calculate the desired sum assured and the premiums to pay on a yearly basis. You can choose your preferred sum assured and tenure, and the calculator will compute the premium amount to the last decimal. At this stage, you are in a better position to judge if you still want to buy the accident insurance policy or not.

5. Submit the information and buy the policy. Once you have all the figures at your fingertips and have decided that the personal accident policy makes fiscal sense to you, you can choose to buy the policy immediately. The processing of the information will take some time, but your policy should be activated within days.

6. Renew the policy regularly. You can pay your premiums online and even file accident insurance claims over the Internet. Make sure to renew the policy regularly, and to even enhance the cover if possible. 

Secure your family with a family health insurance plan

Your worst nightmare is not the one where you or a loved one require hospitalisation – it is when you require hospitalisation and do not have health insurance.

We can never predict what the future will bring. One moment, we are successful, wealthy and in great health. But in the next moment, we may be bed-ridden, ill and facing bankruptcy. There is just a split second difference between the two, and you can do little to prevent a catastrophe from taking place.

Ekta Ruparel, a housewife, faced such a catastrophe a year ago. Driving home from a mall with her husband and son, their car met with a serious accident. “I was unhurt but my husband and son were injured. I had no access to my husband’s bank accounts, so I could not spend the money that was in his account. I had to borrow money from relatives to pay for the hospital expenses. I did not even have time to mourn when my husband passed away two weeks later.”

She believes that if she had pushed her husband to buy a good health insurance plan when everything was fine, her destiny would have been different. “I had to get a job to support the house and to repay all the loans. I wish we had taken insurance, then none of this would have happened,” she says.

Ekta’s story takes place with alarming regularity in many households in India. And yet, most people are still reluctant to take the family health insurance. A family health plan insulates the family against the financial shocks of accidents or illness. Lack of family health care insurance is the riskiest way to live in today’s times, when manmade and natural catastrophes are striking the world with regularity.

Shriram Iyer, a banker, had taken a personal insurance cover several years ago, but now has a comprehensive family medical insurance plan that also takes care of his aged parents. “Most people buying health insurance are only focussed on themselves. But what happens when one’s child is ill or one’s parent meets with an accident? Family health plans take care of these eventualities.”

When buying health insurance for the family, look out for family health plans that are offered on a floater basis. However, ensure that you renew them regularly and are careful with buying a plan whose premiums you can afford to pay. Study all the clauses carefully so that all bases are covered.

“I used to think that I will get the amount that I file a claim for,” says Esther Fernandes, a marketing professional. “However, when we admitted my father to hospital last year, I was stunned to discover that the family health plan imposed sub limits on the claim. There were limits imposed on everything, from the hospital room charges to total expenses. I had not studied what these sub-limits were. We had to pay a large chunk of money out of our pockets,” she says.

All in all, buying family medical insurance is the safest cushion one can provide for the whole family, whatever the future may bring.

*Characters in the article are purely illustrative.

2_5 questions to ask when buying health insurance

That we all require a good health insurance plan for ourselves and our families is an indisputable fact. In today’s world, with rising medical costs and higher chances of falling ill due to stress and overwork, we must ensure that we cover ourselves with the best health insurance policy.

We are living in fortunate times – today, there are a plethora of health insurance options available in the country. However, this large pool of options also makes the process of buying the best health insurance in India that much trickier. Especially for those who are buying health insurance for the first time, the process can get extremely daunting.

Wipe out the confusion from the process – ask yourselves these five questions before you buy the best health insurance policy.

1. What is the sum assured?

The higher the sum assured, the better the benefit for you when the need for treatment or hospitalisation arises. When browsing through insurance plans, find out what the sum assured will be at every stage of the plan, especially when you are over 45 years of age, when the need for the plan may arise.

2. What is the maximum coverage provided?

You will need a health insurance plan that takes into account future expenses based on the current state of your health. If there is a history of heart disease in the family, you will need a high coverage amount to take care of a probable heart surgery for either your parents or yourself. The best health insurance policy will give coverage of even up to Rs 50 lakh.

3. Do you need individual plans or family plans?

If you have a family’s expenses to consider, you should go for low premium but high benefit health family plans. These take the pressure off when a family member meets with an accident or falls ill, and you don’t need to depend on your savings to meet the expenses.

4. What is the insurer’s renewal policy?

The best health insurance in India provides for renewals up to a high age, even up to 75 years. This is an important feature which you may overlook if you are buying insurance when you’re still in your 20s or 30s. But consider the future, when you will fall ill and have the option of renewing the policy even when you are a senior citizen.

5. What is the insurer’s claim settlement ratio?

The higher the insurer’s claim settlement ratio, the better the idea to take a policy from that insurer. Avoid a company that rejects more claims than it settles.

When taking Health Insurance becomes Necessary…

What is the right time to take health insurance for oneself or for the family? Do it while you’re still young and in fiscal control.

Consider this scenario: you’ve just had a baby and the family’s expenses have suddenly doubled. Your wife is not holding a job at the moment, so you’re the sole breadwinner for the three of you. And then the worst thing happens – you fall ill and have to stay at home for at least two months.

In the two months that you are at home, considering that you went one month without pay and that you spent all your savings on your hospitalisation and treatment, did it occur to you that it made no sense to spend every rupee you had saved on your illness? In the days just after you had your baby, did you suppress the thought that if a sudden accident or disease struck you or your loved ones, you really had no backup payment options?

People such as yourself are ideal candidates for health insurance.

Investing for the future

Medical insurance is simply the corpus you set aside every month for future eventualities such as accidents and illnesses requiring hospitalisation and a long period of recovery. Instead of dipping into your current income or savings, this corpus helps tide over the crisis without affecting your life in any way.

Health insurance for hospitalisation relies on paying premiums in the present time so that a healthy corpus can be built for use in the future. Normally, people take medical insurance for the time that they need the policy to cover their hospital expenses when they are not working (such as in their old age) or for the time when a sudden accident necessitates their taking time off from work.

Medical insurance in India is, however, still largely in the nascent stage, with individuals opting for it only when an emergency looms on the horizon. However, the best time to take it is when you are in good physical condition – this helps the insuring company process your check up results and premium terms faster – and in good fiscal control. Normally, a higher return on the medical insurance plan will translate into a higher monthly pay-out; doing this when you’re still young and earning well will give the insuring company the confidence to process your application faster. The older you get, the more difficult it can become to take medical insurance.

However, some companies are offering health insurance even to senior citizens up to the age of 65 years, provided the premiums are being paid for a certain tenure and at a certain rate.

Health Insurance in India Helps Swine Flu Treatment

Swine Flu Myths Busted

According to a Hindustan Times report, around 600 people have died of swine flu in the first three months of 2015. And while an epidemic like situation looms large, misleading myths are compounding fears and causing greater problems. Health insurance in India has suddenly become a valuable commodity, with more and more people considering a purchase, triggered by the fear of possible hospitalization. However, even before you can consider health insurance policies, it is important to debunk a few myths concerning the disease.

Swine Flu: Myths Debunked

• Swine Flu can be contracted by eating pork: Swine flu has nothing do with eating pork can and it can in no way be the source of infection. The disease is spread through infected droplets expelled in the air by sneezing or wheezing. If you come in direct contact with these droplets, you are likely to get infected. Affected people are contagious from the first to the seventh day after showing symptoms and they need to be quarantined.

• There is no cure for Swine Flu: This is possibly the biggest myth that needs to be countered. Oseltamivir is a common drug that is sold under the brand name of Tamiflu and needs to be administered on time for effective treatment. In case symptoms persist or the patient experiences difficulty in breathing, hospitalization is warranted immediately. Having health insurance in India would be of great help in getting treated at a well equipped private hospital with an isolated ward for Swine Flu patients.

• The Swine Flu Virus has Mutated: This is not true, although some dailies carried news concerning the same. India’s premier labs like National Institute of Virology in Pune and National Centre for Disease Control in Delhi have carried out tests to show that there has been no mutation. The virus that is wreaking havoc this year is identical to the one that affected almost a thousand people last year.

• Swine Flu Attacks once in a Lifetime: This is not true. The virus can infect and re-infect you any number of times if you are exposed to infection. This is why workers who are in constant touch with patients are considered for vaccination. The vaccine remains active for one year. However, you must ask your doctor before getting vaccinated.

• I must panic if I get Swine Flu: There is absolutely no reason to panic. All you need to do is know the symptoms and seek prompt treatment. And if you have health insurance in India, the cost of hospitalization should not worry you either. Panicking will hardly help the situation.

It is also important to undertake preventive measures like using alcohol based sanitizers and keeping away from public places.