Guide To Critical Illness Life insurance

Good health is a treasure that one starts relishing or valuing most after undergoing an episode of illness. You can avoid it by taking precautions and leading a healthy lifestyle but what is of utmost importance is ‘be prepared for the worse’. If god forbid you or your loved one gets diagnosed with any life changing or life threatening ailment, you entire life’s system is thrown out of track. Of course one cannot save so much as to pay for unpaid debts/ mortgages or the household expenses, that’s when a Critical illness insurance cover comes in the picture and provides you the financial cushion.

Critical illness insurance is a long-term insurance policy which offers to pay you a lump sum payment to cater to the financial challenges that surface when a person gets diagnosed with critical illness. This payment is generally tax-free. Here is some important information about critical illness insurance:

1. Critical illness insurance generally covers a specific list of diseases or syndromes like Cancer, Heart diseases, stroke, come or age-related serious ailments, it does not cover all diseases or syndromes, so it is worth checking that what all conditions are covered in the policy you are buying. The relatively cheaper policies have lesser number of ailments covered and have very strict terms of payment.

2. The cost of the insurance will depend on your age and health. If you are young, healthy, have good family health history then the chances of you getting critically ill are less, but the older you get, you tend to become more susceptible to these ailments.

3. In most of the cases, critical insurance might not cover health issues that existed before the term of insurance policy started. Also, this type of insurance does not pay if you die, unless the critical illness policy has been combined with Life insurance. It specifies a minimum number of days that you must survive after being diagnosed with the critical illness, to be able to claim the insurance. This minimum is generally 14 days.

4. When it comes to payment of claim, these critical illness insurance policies also pay the costs of treatment of the critical illness including the fee of the Doctor and the procedures performed at some selected list of hospitals, but there might be a cap at the amount of money they pay.

5. One of the key features of critical illness policy is that it pays for any House modification that you may need to do to according to the changed lifestyle needs after the illness.

After reading all of this, if you still feel that you do not need a critical insurance cover, then you must have a lot of financial savings or back up to tide you over the tough time that you may face at the time of illness OR you must have a family member who can cover you at the difficult time.