It is natural that no human plans to be sick or even envisage when he is going to fall sick. However, it is equally natural that sickness can start anytime and anywhere. Sometimes, it comes outside our comfort zones. And some other times, we may not have the money to attend to the illness as it comes. And when we do have the money, the illness may end up consuming all the monies we have been saving over a long time for other purposes other than medical bills. More so, the rising cost of medical attention is equally not helping matters. This is the reason behind medical insurance.
Medical insurances are adopted by smart people to take care of the issues raised above. They insure their health and in times when they are sick, the insurer will step in to take care of or pay the medical expenses.
MEANING OF MI
Medical insurance is the type of polic that provides insurance coverage for the expenses or bills arising from illnesses. These medical bills or expenses could be related to the payments for the cost of hospitalizations, drugs, consultancy, diagnosis and others. Medical insurance provides insurance coverage for the bills arising from the policyholder’s medical and surgical expenses. The level of coverage is however subject to the terms of the policy. In most cases, the insurance pay the hospitals directly while in others, the policyholder pay the health care provider from his pockets and apply to his insurer for reimbursement.
TYPES OF MEDICAL INSURANCE
Just like different people have different medical insurance needs, so do we have different types of policy to take care of these numerous medical needs. This is more because a single medical insurance policy may not be able to cover an individual’s needs medically. Some of these types of medical insurance are;
- Critical illness medical insurance
- Individual medical insurance
- Group insurance
- Family insurance
- Senior citizens insurance
Critical Illness Plan
As the name implies, critical illness medical insurance is a class of policy that caters or provides insurance coverage for serious illnesses such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, kidney failures, stroke and others in similar category.
These kinds of illnesses are very expensive to cater for and most times take a long period of time to heal. They are provided for by insurance companies as a rider or as an add-on policy with other medical insurance policy or bought as a separate policy. The indemnity from the insurance company is most times in the form of payment of claims as a single lump after the discovery of a critical sickness such as the ones mentioned above.
Individual Medical Insurance
This is the type of policy that makes provision for a personal medical coverage. This could be for yourself, your wife, your children or even your parents. The level of insurance coverage is typically for all kinds of medical expenses such as hospitalization and attendant bills, hospital accommodation, medications and others. In this type of insurance, each policyholder has an individual insured amount which will be a payout in the event the insured medical incident happens.
Group Insurance
This is the opposite of individual medical policy. This is the type of policy that provides coverage for a specific group of persons or individuals. This type is mostly used by employers who buy group policy for all employees. Although this type of policy is not as expensive as the individual insurance policy, it however does not cover as much items of insurance as that of the individual medical insurance. In effect, group medical insurance policy only covers basic health issues.
Family Plan
This type of insurance policy covers the entire family members under a single policy and every named person shares the same insured amount. This is also more affordable than the individual policy due to the sharing of the insured sum. For example, if you buy family medical insurance policy for your family with a sum insured as $100. In a single policy year, you will only make claims worth $100. Similarly, you may make a claim worth $60 and your wife, a claim of say $20 and your child $20 and vice-versa bringing it to total insured sum of $100. This type of policy is good for young families.
Senior Citizens Medical Insurance
This type of policy is mainly for the health concerns senior citizens. Most of their policies offer additional coverage such as hospitalization and psychiatric issues.
Benefits
There are several benefits with buying medi insurance policy, some of these benefits includes but not limited to;
- Critical illness cover: the policy offers protection or insurance coverage for critical illnesses.
- Helps to ameliorate the high cost of medi- care: the insurance policy pays for the type of coverage it insures.
- Easy cashless claims: as a result of the fact that almost all med providers are connected to huge network of hospitals and other health care providers, the process of receiving emergency medical care is made very smooth and easy. The policyholder is not required by the hospitals linked with the insurer to pay a dime before receiving medical attention with respect to covered treatments.
- Peace of mind: having this policy affords the policyholder maximum peace of mind knowing full well that he will not pay out of his pocket in the time of medical care.
