Why is having health insurance important ?
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The need for having a health policy is a
very important one and yours truly got a dose of it himself when he was
whisked into a hospital for a week with acute viral fever.
Being loaded with adequate health cover
(also called mediclaim in India), I was safe with cashless
hospitalization but are you ? Do you realize why is having health insurance so important and that too of an adequate amount ?
We look at some important reasons for having a good health policy in your financial planning.
1. No insurance means financial burden for an individual
For individuals and families that are
not having mediclaim or little, any hospitalization means spending money
from their pocket to pay the hospital. With the current medical costs
in India and worldwide rising year after year, this can set you back big
time.
In a country like India where you still
boast of joint families and support to elderly parents, the probability
of hospitalization each year is more. If you keep paying from your
pocket each year, then essentially you have lost the plot of making
money. Being uninsured is a dumb move to make.
2. Being under-insured can lead to inadequate medical care
Having a health policy is important and
this is highlighted in the many occasions when you walk into a hospital
for treatment and the first question they ask you is “Do you have
insurance ?”.
If you do, good luck.
If not, they ask you to first pay up
some amount as deposit before they can hospitalize you. Then they keep
asking you for more money on a timely basis to make sure you can pay
them.
But what happens if you do not have the
money to pay them ? They will obviously chuck the patient out and it is
for this very reason that begin under-insured leads to inadequate
medical care. A patient with mediclaim will be subject to more tests and
care than one without one.
It has been observed that no mediclaim
can lead to more fatal outcomes for an individual. The inadequate
medical care over a long period of time proves to be detrimental for the
person.
It is but obvious why having a health cover is important.
3. Covering pre existing diseases
It is a no brainer that one should look to have a pre existing diseases policy.
The IRDA (Insurance Regulatory and
Authority India) has mandated a maximum of 4 years after which your pre
existing diseases need to be covered by your mediclaim policy but the
health insurance companies could cover it much earlier as well.
Remember that the probability that a pre
existing disease recurs again is more than a new one happening, so this
makes it more important for one to ask why having a health cover is
important these days and especially for pre existing diseases.
4. And then there are other policies apart from mediclaim
Mediclaim is meant when you want to cover a 24 hours hospitalization.
But what happens if a critical illness
strikes you. Something like cancer will exhaust the limit of your
mediclaim very quickly. Will you put in your own money towards treatment
then ?
That is precisely why a medical corpus
is needed. Today’s medical emergencies are such that a simple mediclaim
policy does not suffice. You need more policies.
Take a personal accident insurance policy in case you have an accident and cannot work for sometime.
Take a critical illness policy for prescribed critical illnesses.
Take mediclaim for your entire family. For your young family, a family floater will do but for elderly parents, go for individual health insurance policies.
Form a medical corpus for you and your family.
If you want to stay healthy and sound,
you need all off these policies. Not having one can come back to haunt
you at the time an illness strikes and that is when you might realize
its importance.
It is better to be safe than sorry. So are you missing on any of these ?