With a rise of life style diseases and ever increasing health care cost, the lack of adequate health cover can severely affect your financial goals. You should think of supplementing your existing health insurance cover with a Critical Illness policy and a Personal Accident policy.
What is a critical illness policy?
Critical illness policy is an insurance cover against some specified critical diseases. In this policy, the insurance company pays a lump sum cash amount when the specified disease is diagnosed irrespective of the amount spent on the illness. While your mediclaim policy reimburses the actual amount spend in the hospital, critical illness policy will give you a lump sum amount, as per your policy value. Mediclaim cuts down ones hospitalization cost where as critical illness policy helps in compensating ones financial loss during a serious illness.
Diseases covered
The diseases covered vary from company to company and one needs to check the exact details before buying the policy. Most common diseases covered are – Cancer, Major Organ Transplant, Heart Valve Replacement, Total Blindness, End Stage Renal Disease, Kidney failure etc.
Exclusions
There are certain exclusions which vary from company to company. It is important to know the exclusions, while taking the policy to avoid any confusion later.
Personal Accident Policy
This policy offer coverage against Accidental Death or Permanent Total Disablement (PTD) due to an accident. In case of death of the policy holder due to accident, the nominee will receive the full Sum insured. The policy also compensate by paying the full sum insured in case of Permanent Total Disablement (PTD) due to accident. This is really a support when the policy holder is disabled, and is not in a position to carry out his normal work. No other policy will be useful in such conditions.
Some time a person met with an accident and loses his body parts – may not be able to work in future. In case of Permanent total disability 100% sum insured is given to the insured person. It covers:
- Loss of both hands or both feet or one hand and one foot
- Loss of a Limb (hand/foot) and an eye
- Complete and irrecoverable loss of sight of both eyes
- Complete and irrecoverable loss of speech & hearing of both ears
The policy also pays a certain percentage of the sum insured in case of permanent partial disability and Temporary total disability.
Certain policies reimburse the hospitalization expenses due to accident and also pay a daily allowance for each day spends in the hospital. This policy covers different types of accidents like road, rail accidents, accidents due to natural calamities and arising out of terrorism/ terrorist acts. There is no medical examination to take this policy and the policy cover is worldwide. Please read the policy conditions before taking the policy to see the scope of cover.
The premium for this policy per lakh will be in the range of 150-200 and is in the affordable range of all of us.
The health insurance policy will act as the base policy, in case of a hospitalization and will reimburse the hospital expenses. Critical illness policy will come to the rescue in case of any major diseases, which will make us unfit for sometime from performing the routine work. Personal accident policy will support in case of an accidental death or disability. All these complement each other and a combination of these 3 will act as a comprehensive health cover.
But selecting the right health cover from the many available in the market is very important from the customer’s point of view.