5 Things To Consider While Purchasing Health Insurance During A Pandemic
Health insurance is a long-term investment that requires careful planning. When determining health insurance premiums, it's important to consider medical history, income, and available funds. This would be useful in determining the type(s) of health insurance policy (ies), such as individual policies, family floater choices, senior citizen policies, critical sickness benefit policies, top-ups, or super top-ups, and the necessary coverage level, or sum assured.
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Comprehensive and timely coverage
Health insurance protects against hospitalisation costs. This should be minimised by having enough base cover (pre-, in-patient, and post-hospitalisation costs coverage, for example) and add-on covers or riders (such as maternity benefits, major organ transplant, critical illness cover etc.). The latter option lets you tailor the strategy to your medical needs. Timely coverage means reduced waiting periods.
Claim-oriented features
You'll really benefit from having health insurance plans if and when you need to go to the hospital for an unexpected medical issue and your insurance will cover the associated expenditures. Although hospitalisations and subsequent claims filings are not always common, the policyholder should nevertheless reap some benefits.
Exhaustive cover for incidental medical expenses:
There should ideally be no ceiling or maximum amount paid for certain categories of expenses. These should be accepted on an actual expenses basis or without restrictions to ensure that the insured hospitalised member has access to high-quality care in a relaxing setting.
Insurer-oriented features
The chosen plan's insurance company should have a high claim settlement ratio (CSR), which measures its propensity to settle more claims in a fiscal year. Insurance Brokers Association of India (IBAI) claims settlement efficiency ratio indicates an insurer's ability to settle claims within 3 months.
Pandemic-specific coverage:
The second wave of the pandemic strained the country's health infrastructure due to exponential spread and high cases of infection, especially among comorbid patients. In such cases, health insurance plans with domiciliary hospitalization cover (at-home hospital-like care on doctor's suggestion) up to sum insured for maximum number of days and alternate therapy cover such as AYUSH (also up to sum insured) may be helpful.
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