Buying Health Insurance

Choose your health insurance plan carefully

It is important to read the fine print of the health insurance plan carefully when you buy a health insurance plan. Of special importance are the exclusions part as that lists down the diseases that would not be covered. The longer the list of exclusions, the less useful the policy can be. N exclusion basically means the disease or situations under which the health insurance policy would not cover a medical claim.

A common exclusion in most plans is pre existing diseases. Pre existing disease means a disease or a medical condition that has been diagnosed or treated prior to the date on which the person has registered himself under the health insurance plan. However these days there are certain plans which allow for pre existing diseases if the person has been under the same insurer’s insurance plan for a continuous period of 3 – 5 years. Another exclusion which is there in many health insurance policies is on the critical illness rider where they say that claims will not be paid if the illness is contracted within 90-120 days of the customer enrolling himself under the plan.

Senior citizen health plans exclude many diseases and in certain cases , needs to be topped up with a critical illness rider. A critical illness rider attached to a life insurance cover or as a standalone policy pays the entire sum insured and terminates the underlying policy once the claim is made. A claim can be made only once for a particular illness.

Another fine print that customers should look into is what is the maximum insurable age under the policy. The higher the maximum insurable age is, the better it is from the customer’s perspective.

Last but not the least, the customer should look at the claim paying ratio of the insurance company. Insurance companies are sometimes notorious for rejecting claims on the basis of medical or technical grounds. Get yourself insured with a health insurance company who you think is fair. In the US , there has been a lot of criticism against the major health insurance companies where it has been reported that employees have been incentivized to reject claims.