How to Compare Different Health Plans For Your Family?

What is health insurance?

Health insurance plans are crafted to offer protection against unprecedented or planned medical expenses. It covers hospitalization charges, pre-and post-hospitalization costs, ICU, and daycare expenses, and other associated costs. The insurance holder is supposed to pay a certain amount of premium at a certain interval for a specific tenure. A health plan enjoys tax benefits under the 1961 IT Act. 

Several types of health plans offer protection against family hospitalization expenses, which can be cashless or reimbursement nature through a network hospital or nursing home. You can compare health insurance policy, from different sites to know the best deal on offer. 

Why do I need a health insurance policy?

You need protection against medical costs because of their rising nature and the increase in lifestyle diseases. Moreover, apart from expected illnesses, the chance of accidental medical contingency causes a massive outflow of resources and turns the entire scenario of your financial portfolio. A few days of hospitalization is enough to eat up your savings. You need medical coverage to prevent that from happening. 

Family health insurance plan

Any of your family members can experience a medical emergency at any point in time. So, it is best that you hold a health plan that covers all your family members. A good health plan must be comprehensive, providing enough financial coverage to your family.

This guide will help you show how to compare different health plans for your family to make the right choice.

The nature of the health plans is family floater type, which implies that it will cover several members of your family, including yourself, your spouse, dependent children, and dependent parents. Some special plans even extend the coverage to parents-in-law, siblings, and other extended family members.  

How to choose and compare health insurance policy?

1. Make the right choice:

Several types of health plans include individual plans, family floater plans, senior citizen plans, disease-specific plans, critical illness plans, top-up, and super top-up plans. You should ideally invest in a family floater policy and a separate senior citizen plan for your parents. Experts recommend maintaining a critical illness plan along with an indemnity health plan. 

2. Enough sum assured

To determine the adequate sum that you need to assure, sort out how many family members you want to include. Keeping the inflation factor in mind, assure a high sum. But it comes at the cost of a high premium. You can choose a top-up plan, but it acts as a supplemental plan and comes with a deductible limit. 

3. Comprehensive coverage benefits

Ensure that the plan you are buying covers all the required relevant expenses. You can study and compare several plans online to know the best one. 

4. Check for the limits and sub-limits

Certain plans possess sub-limits on room rents, particularly in case of paltry sum assured. Such sub-limits restrain overall coverage. However, policies with sub-limits are comparatively expensive. Certain popular coverage facilities where sub-limits are applicable include AYUSH treatments (alternative medical treatments), OPD costs, maternity costs, domiciliary charges, organ donor charges.  

5. Coverage riders

You can enjoy coverage riders by paying an additional premium. Such coverages include personal accidental coverage, critical illness cover, daily cash benefit rider, OPD coverage, maternity and neonatal coverage. 

6. Hospital network

Check the network of hospitals where your policy is applicable. It allows cashless coverage.

7. Waiting period

While buying a health plan, if you or any of your family members is suffering from any ailment, it is called pre-existing illness. There is a waiting period to cover the treatment costs of such ailments. Check out the term of this waiting period. 

8. Compare premiums

Compare your premium value with several insurance companies to select for the least with required coverage. 

9. Exclusions

Check out what factors are excluded from the plan. If such exclusions hamper your requirement, compare insurance plans and choose another.

10. Premium discounts

Choose the one that offers maximum premium discounts, without essentially hampering your coverage requirement. Such discounts are offered for a claim-free year; adding multiple family members; long-term plan discount; online policy purchase discount, etc.

11. Value-added facilities

When you compare insurance plans, check for value-added benefits or additional benefits that come along with coverage benefits. It commonly includes sum insured restoration, free health check-ups, telemedicine facilities, free medical consultation, loyalty programs, etc. 

These are the essential factors that you need to consider while purchasing an ideal family health insurance policy.