Let’s try to understand the specific needs of both plans and find out why health insurance and a critical illness plan are required separately.
Basic Feature
Health insurance reimburses your medical and OPD expenses during hospitalization.
It also may not cover all the diseases while generally requiring a long waiting period.
Whereas, a critical illness policy covers life threatening diseases such as multiple sclerosis, cancer, kidney failure, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.
The insured with Critical Illness policies gets the covered amount for their expenses as soon as he / she is diagnosed with any of the above listed critical illnesses.
For example, Mutual of Omaha might pay a lump sum up to $250,000 based upon diagnosis of a critical illness.
A critical illness policy has no association or concern with the hospitalization expenses.
Both a health insurance policy and a critical illness plan have different scopes of coverage.
Health insurance covers accident and a wide variety of ailments after a defined period of time while even covering pre-existing disease and maternity health whereas a critical illness policy covers a specified list of critical illnesses that could number from 6 to 12 depending on the insurer.
Critical Illness insurance according to the policy offered may cover circumstances like travel, boarding on a temporary basis, postoperative care, and loss of pay.
Benefits
Benefits of mediclaim or a health insurance plan includes the reimbursement of hospitalization expenses where the bills are paid directly from the TPA/insurance company while the patient gets treated at the network hospital.
Another benefit with health insurance is the policy will continue to pay until your entire sum is exhausted and you can be renewed each year.
Critical illness plans on the other hand have their own set of defined advantages such as what was mentioned previously in the article that the insured receives a tax free lump sum after diagnosis of a specified critical illness.
With this money the insured can spend it as he or she wishes.
In this policy the insured is not required to present bills or manage with photocopies and once the claim is paid the policy expires.
Waiting Period
Both mediclaim and critical illness policies follow the concept of a waiting period.
Apart from accident related loss, health insurance policies have a waiting period for the first 30 days and the illness contracted during this duration from the commencement of the policy is excluded.
Whereas in the case of a critical policy there is a 3 month in general waiting period and the illness diagnosed in this period is not included in the coverage.
Conclusion
While mediclaim policies are bought to defray hospitalization expenses, a critical illness policy compensates the financial expenses that arise from serious illness.
Both policies are designed to serve some particular purpose and supplement each other and hence both plans are necessary and should be purchased separately.
It is wise to consider the enormous out of pocket expense for a serious disease if you are not covered with a critical illness policy.
Please give Medical Solutions NY a call to help plan with your critical illness insurance needs!