World Heart Day - Heart Health Awareness: Comprehensive Insurance Plans for Cardiovascular Care

What is a Comprehensive Insurance Plan for Cardiovascular Care?

Comprehensive insurance plans for cardiovascular care are the ones that provide coverage against heart-related diseases. Health insurers offer specialized health insurance policies including critical illness insurance with cardiovascular care for heart patients covering acute heart diseases.

Key Features of Comprehensive Insurance Plans for Cardiovascular Care

Below are some key features of comprehensive insurance plans for cardiovascular care:

Coverage against Hospitalization – A comprehensive health plan would compensate the expenses incurred for treatment costs for heart diseases including hospitalization charges

Financial Coverage – Your comprehensive plan allows mental peace in terms of expenses incurred on hospitalization costs for cardiovascular issues. The policyholder can raise a claim in such cases to reimburse the finances

Lump Sum Sum insured – Most critical illness policies offer a lump sum amount if a policyholder is diagnosed with a heart ailment to get treatment, pay debts, or for other requirements like recovering the income they lost

Coverage against Loss of Income - Many heart health insurance policies compensate the policyholder for their loss of income and to meet miscellaneous expenses.

Overseas Treatment Coverage – As per the policy chosen, some cardiovascular healthcare policies might cover overseas treatment.

What Do Cardiac Health Insurance Plans cover?

Your cardiac care health insurance policies might offer the following coverage:

In-hospitalization coverage – This coverage helps the policyholder to avail coverage for costs like room rent, ICU charges, and others. This benefit can be availed under cashless claims as well as reimbursement claims if the treatment is done in a non-network hospital.

Pre- and post-hospitalization coverage – Like other health insurance plans, cardiac care insurance plans cover pre- and post-hospitalization expenses for the specified number of days as mentioned in the policy document.

Domiciliary hospitalization coverage – Depending on your cardiac health plan, you may get coverage for costs incurred on domiciliary hospitalization, which means if the insured requires a home health care service as suggested by the doctor, it will be covered under the health insurance plan.

Myocardial Infarction Coverage – Most cardiovascular heart insurance plans cover myocardial infarction treatment. So, if the blood supply is inadequate to the heart, your heart muscle may die. In this case, your treatment expenses will be covered under the plan.

Refractory Failure of Heart – If a heart specialist diagnoses this condition and if the report reveals elevated biomarkers,it might be covered under your policy depending on the policy wording.

Annual Preventive Health Check-ups - Health insurance policies for cardiac health provide annual preventive health check-up benefits so that the policyholder can ensure their heart health and can diagnose any irregularity early on to get the best treatment

Alternative Treatments – Some insurance policies for heart care cover the costs incurred on AYUSH treatment, which includes Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, and homeopathy.

How to Prevent Heart Diseases for Better Heart Health?

Following a good lifestyle and understanding how you can take care of your heart is a great way to prevent heart diseases. It is important to know what you should do to enhance heart health and what you should avoid doing. Let us take a look at some strategies that can be followed to help protect your heart:

• Avoid Smoking or Using Tobacco – Smoking cigarettes or using non-smoking tobacco is dangerous to your heart. So, if you are into the habit of smoking, quit it right away, and even if you do not smoke stay away from smokers to avoid second-hand smoking.
   
• Practice 30-60 minutes of Activity Daily – Maintaining regular physical activity is important to lower the chances of heart disease. It also helps in controlling your weight as well as lowers the chances of other diseases. You may aim to get 150 minutes of brisk walk, 75 minutes of running, and two-three strength training sessions per week.
   
• Eat a Healthy Diet to Benefit the Heart – A healthy diet has many benefits. To eat a heart healthy diet, try to incorporate lots of vegetables and fruits in your diet. Also include beans and other legumes, lean meat, fish, low-fat dairy, whole grains, olive oil and so on.

Also, make sure to avoid the intake of high-sodium, refine sugar and sweet beverages, refined carbohydrates, alcohol, processed food, saturated fat, palm oil, full-fat dairy, trans fat, etc.

• Maintain weight – Being overweight or obese increases the risk of heart diseases. Especially, being overweight around the middle portion of the body can increase the risk of diseases more. BMI or the body mass index is used to find out if a person is overweight or obese.

Besides the above, try to get quality sleep of at least 7 hours. Try to maintain a sleep schedule and go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day to stick to the schedule. In addition, you must also avoid stress and anxiety to avoid high-blood pressure and other factors. To manage stress, you can do yoga, meditation, and exercise. Above all, getting regular health check-ups is also very important.