Picking the right health insurance plan made easy: Here's how to choose one that suits you the most

The outbreak of coronavirus pandemic has brought the importance of health insurance to the forefront.

- Ashwini Kumar Sharma

With cost of hospitalisation running into a few lakh for the treatment of Covid-19, buying adequate health cover and the right health insurance policy is important. Instead of waiting for the best plan, one should try choosing the right plan that can help one meet most of the hospitalisation cost. This is because not all health insurance plans are similar and may offer variety of benefits. The structure, nomenclature and its definitions could be standardised and may largely be same but in terms of benefits attached to them, there could be differences. And remember, each such difference leads to variation in premium.

So, to start looking for the ‘best’ health plan would not serve the purpose. Try to understand the way a health plan works and about their features, so as to buy the best that suits you.

Plan variants

The first basic differentiation arises with availability of plain-vanilla health insurance plan offering the most basic features, benefits and an advanced or a loaded version of the health insurance plan by the same insurer. What the advanced version offers and its cost-benefit equation, needs to be understood by buyer.

Most of the time, buyers may be made to buy the advanced version while they could have met the requirement from the basic version.

In the advanced version which may go by various names such as exclusive, gold, platinum, premium etc, there could be several extras. For example, sum insured (SI) could be allowed up to Rs 25 lakh or higher as against a cap of Rs 3/5 lakh in basic version. Even the claim of pre-existing disease that is typically allowed after 48 months could be allowed after 36 months.