Medical Insurance Plans
How to enhance your existing health insurance plan Most of us purchase health insurance cover keeping in view our current needs. What we forget during this process is how this sum will become inadequate a couple of years later. With age, our needs and liabilities change, and what was enough then may not serve the purpose now. When we are young & single, we can easily make-do with vanilla health insurance plan. However, this coverage would fall flat on our face as we grow older, get married and have kids. Hence, it is very important for us to review and enhance health insurance cover as per the life-stage we are in. So how do we go about this? Let’s look at some of the options that you can explore:
Restoration option or refill benefit Do you know that there are medical insurance plans which come with a built-in restoration benefit that can automatically reinstate your basic cover, if you exhaust it during the policy tenure? In such a plan, health insurers can reinstate up to 100% of sum insured, so technically, you are covered for double the amount of your basic cover size. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Having said that, what you need to make note of is that such plans are not as useful as they are made to appear on the paper. Let’s understand this further. Firstly, let’s look at the cost aspect.
This brings us to our second option – opting for a second health plan. Additional standalone insurance plan: You can choose this option if you are willing to spend higher amount as premium and have no issues managing multiple insurance policies. Personally, I would not want to spend Rs 6,000 as premium for additional coverage of Rs 5lacs when I could easily get the same (perhaps, more) coverage by paying lesser premium. Top-Up plans Top-Up plan can be classified as your back-up plan in case you exhaust the entire base cover. It would come into force only after you cross your threshold limit. Let’s assume that you have Rs 5lacs health cover and top-up plan of Rs 15lacs. Your total coverage, in this scenario will be Rs 15lacs (Rs 5lacs from base plan + Rs 10lacs from top-up plan, with Rs 5lacs deductible).
Super Top-Up plan Super Top-Up plan wins hands down if we compare it with all the options that we touched upon. Simply put, it is an improved version of Top-Up plan that would come into force as soon as you exhaust your base cover. What differentiates Super top-up plans from top-up plans is the fact that it takes the total bill amount into consideration, irrespective of the number of bills your hospital raises. It is important to note that Super Top-Up plan would cost you a little bit more than Top-Up plan. If you have a health insurance policy of Rs 5lacs and plan to enhance it further by Rs 5lacs, you will have to spend around Rs 2,000 for a Top-Up plan and Rs 3,000 for a Super Top-Up plan. What goes in favor of Super Top-Up plans is that they go beyond the aggregate threshold limit.
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