I have health insurance with my employer - Should I have one separate too? Scenarios we have experienced...
You may have group health insurance cover with your employer already - That is good as it provides the below benefits already:
- There is no 2-year waiting period for certain treatments & for pre-existing diseases.
- Your parents may be covered in the same plan where the above is covered too.
But having a separate insurance apart from group insurance is absolutely necessary for the below reasons - We have experienced the below situations, where in the client was hospitalized but without any cover.
- Employer chooses to stop the benefit suddenly, especially for parents.
- Employer increases the premium substantially high due to higher claims incurred - hence it becomes kind of unaffordable, again especially for parents.
- Customer switches job & during the change-over time (even for 15 days) & during probation period of 6 months, the insurance cover was not available.
- Customer / family members become uninsurable - meaning they would have undergone certain treatments that the insurance company would refuse to entertain fresh policies.
- There were sub-limits in the group health insurance cover - for certain treatments / room rent. Due to this, the claim received was less.
- The sum insured was less & it was not sufficient to take care of treatment expenses completely.
- Since parents are also covered under the same policy, few cases the entire sum insured was used by the parents in that year & unfortunately there was no cover left for claims for other family members.
- In individual policies, there will be no-claim bonus which increases the sum insured every year. This takes care of inflation of hospitalization expenses automatically.
- In individual policies, there are waiting period of 2 years for certain treatments & 3-4 years for pre-existing diseases. Hence taking it when we are young & healthy will ensure that you would have lived through the waiting periods already.
