How to choose an individual medical insurance plan?
To maintain a healthy lifestyle, besides eating right, exercising regularly and sleeping well, having a comprehensive individual medical insurance plan can help bring peace of mind when needs arise. The following are some criteria to consider when choosing your medical insurance plan:
Benefits coverage
Plan with itemized benefit sublimit (Room and board, doctor’s fee, surgeon’s fee etc.) usually offers global coverage with a lower annual coverage limit.
Full cover plan usually has geographic coverage limitation such as Worldwide, Worldwide excluding US or Asia with a higher annual limit/lifetime limit.
Premium
Premium amounts are influenced by benefit/geographical coverage, age and medical inflations.
Premiums for Itemized benefit sublimit plans are usually lower than that of full cover plans. However, full cover plans allow different deductibles and geographic coverage options which may help lower the premiums.
Certain individual medical insurance plans offer flat premium after a certain age (increase only by medical inflation) to lower the impact of premium increase.
Provider
There are many medical insurance providers in the market and you might have seen many complaints on TV regarding issues and difficulties with medical claim denials. Therefore, it is paramount for you to consider only those with a solid reputation, history and experience of providing medical care which is sustainable into the future.
It is the insured’s responsibility to answer all the health-related questions with utmost faith during the underwriting and application process, to submit claims that are medically necessary and of reasonable and customary charges and pay attention to the exclusion items in the policy.
You may have heard some can arrange clients to go through comprehensive health check covered by medical insurance. These costs which may not be medically necessary, if granted by the insurer, will be borne by all the others in the same pool and likely results in further premium increases.
Voluntary Health Insurance Scheme (VHIS)
In addition to being tax-deductible, the terms and conditions of VHIS plans are standardized across various insurers and supervised by the Insurance Authority.
One of the key features is that it has provisions to cover unknown pre-existing conditions which has been a grey area for traditional medical insurance plans.
Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about various medical plans.
Last Update: 10th October 2022