Health insurance plans and their features and benefits have become increasingly important considering the changing lifestyle and global environment. Making the right choice and deciding early in life will help you receive better benefits ensuring maximum protection. However, choosing the right health insurance plan with varied choices, features, and advantages to serve your requirements becomes extremely difficult. If you plan to purchase health insurance for the first time in your life, here are a few tips to choose the perfect health insurance plan for all your medical needs.
How to Choose the Right Health Insurance Plan?
The health insurance plan can help you manage the financial commitments associated with your hospital bills and treatment charges if you have chosen and purchased the best plan. The following tips will help you to do the same:
- Ensure adequate coverage – Calculating the sum insured is a crucial factor in a health insurance policy. The financial assistance provided by your insurance provider will be based on the coverage assured. Therefore, you can decide on the sum insured based on your family medical history, present health conditions, prevailing hospital charges, and the medical inflation rate. You can contact the customer service executives and request their assistance for the same.
- Compare different policies – With the increase in demand and technology, insurance providers have been introducing different health insurance policies to ensure the best financial assistance for their policyholders. Therefore, it is your responsibility to compare and choose the best health insurance plans for your family needs.
- Choose an affordable premium – A health insurance plan is a product you have to maintain for a lifetime because you will realize its benefits at different stages in your life. Therefore, it is important to choose an affordable plan considering your family commitments and financial liabilities to retain the benefits and financial assistance throughout life.
- Enquire about the empanelled hospitals – The network of hospitals managed by your insurer is an important criterion for choosing the best health insurance plan. If you require multi-speciality hospital assistance, you have to ensure if your insurer can help you with the same. It is easy to get financial support from an empanelled hospital rather than going to another hospital, paying the bill out of your pocket and getting reimbursed later.
- Check for the insurer’s reputation – Your insurer’s reputation is important in purchasing a health insurance plan. The insurer should have the best claim settlement ratio, good customer reviews and a reliable means of customer support to engage your requirements promptly. The claim settlement ratio will tell you the number of claims settled out of the total number filed. In addition, you can also try communicating to the people availing of the services of your insurer for a better experience.
- Be transparent about your medical records – While purchasing a health insurance plan, you should disclose your health condition and information regarding your pre-existing illness for the best coverage and financial assistance. Suppose there is a serious illness common to your family that can affect you at a later stage, such as cancer. In that case, you can avail of additional rider benefits to support you under rigorous treatment situations.
- Health insurance process and waiting period – The waiting period for availing the different benefits varies between the insurers. There is a specific duration for claiming financial support for a pre-existing illness, maternity cover, etc. You have to enquire about these waiting periods and the claim processes for deciding the health insurance plan. If you are purchasing it for an immediate requirement, you should check if the insurer has the option for the same.
- Start investing early – If you start investing in a health insurance plan early in life, you will develop the discipline of saving and setting aside a specific amount for your health issues if it is bound to occur later in life. Also, at a younger age, you will have a lot of money to allocate for such investments as the extent of family commitments will be less.
- Consider family floater plans – Insurers have introduced family floater plans to include every member in your family as a part of the health insurance plan. Therefore, you can use the benefits when any member falls sick and needs immediate medical treatment.
- Purchase health insurance online – With the advent of technological development and increasing competitiveness, insurers introduced online facilities to purchase and maintain your records online. You can find information on how to choose health insurance, apply for the claim and the factors to consider online. It is extremely cost-efficient, easy, convenient and secure. In addition, you can compare different policies, use the online calculator to check the affordable premium and decide on the sum insured.
Conclusion
Health insurance plans provide the best financial support when you are in extreme need of managing your medical bills. In addition, they offer a range of add-on benefits and other online facilities for effective use of the policy. Therefore, it becomes your responsibility to understand the different products and choose the one that will benefit you the most.
The points discussed here will help you choose the best option when you are confused about considering factors while purchasing a health insurance plan. So be smart and stay protected!
