Health Insurance – Riders and Benefits

Health Insurance – Riders and Benefits

If you or your loved ones fall prey to an illness, health insurance proves to be of much help, at least from a financial perspective. While making a health insurance claim, nothing can be more annoying than getting your claim denied. The annoyance upsurges if you get to know that the obvious exclusion could have been covered if a particular rider had been bought with the plan.

Riders are valuable add-ons to a health plan to widen its basic coverage. This way, the plan becomes comprehensive and you get the best of it without getting entangled in the tricky clauses. Here are the common riders and benefits in a health insurance plan.

1). Hospital Cash Benefit

In the case of a hospitalization, even if you get treatment in a network hospital on a cashless basis, you still have petty expenses to take care of, such as transportation cost, nursing expenses and so forth. Hospital Cash Benefit comes handy by providing fixed cash to the insured on a daily basis to equip him/her to meet such miscellaneous expenses involved during the hospital stay.

2). Maternity Care Benefit

A standard health insurance does not cover pregnancy related expenses. At present times, giving birth to baby has become quite a costly affair. By adding maternity care benefit you make sure that your bump-to-baby journey goes smoothly and stress free. The maternity benefit include delivery charges, pre and post natal coverage, hospitalization expenses, new born care, etcetera.

3). Dental and Vision Care Benefit

Expenses incurred on dental and vision care are not reimbursed under a standard health insurance. But they are in no way any less expensive than regular health care. By adding this benefit, the insured gets covered for dental and vision care also.

4). Personal Accident Rider

The grave mistake customers make while buying a health insurance is assuming that they are getting covered for the accidents under their health insurance plan. This presumption is far from truth, here’s why. In case of an accident, your health insurance plan is going to reimburse only the hospital expenses involved. Obviously, this amount will not suffice the immense financial loss caused by an accident.

A Personal Accident Rider makes sure that the insured gets a substantial financial coverage in case he/she meets an accident.

5). Critical Illness Rider

There are certain major illnesses, such as cancer, heart attack, paralysis, for which hospitalization expenses are way too high to be covered under a regular health insurance plan. Under critical illness rider, if the insured is diagnosed with such an illness, he/she will be paid out a rider sum assured. This amount stands substantial enough to cover the massive expenses involved in critical illnesses.

6). Health Insurance Portability

A health insurance plan comes with its own set of limitations. One of such limitations is, having to go through a waiting period before your illness starts getting covered under your plan. Every time you buy a new plan, you have to bear the waiting period all over again.

To address this issue, IRDA created a feature called as health insurance portability and made it mandatory for all the insurers.  This feature enables the insured to switch from one insurer to another insurer, without having to go over the waiting period afresh.

7). Top-up Insurance Plan

At some point of the policy term, the insured might feel a need to enhance the coverage on his/her health plan. In such a case, the insured should go for a top-up rather than buying a new plan. A top-up is a kind of add on to the health insurance plan that lets the policyholder to extend his coverage at a nominal additional cost.

This additional cost on the premium is quite less than what the insured would expend to buy a second health plan. One more benefit of getting a top-up plan is that the insured doesn’t need to go through a medical screening.

8). Domiciliary Hospitalization

At times, the doctor recommends his patient to be treated at home instead of the hospital, such as when the hospital room is not available or the patient is too critical to be transferred to the hospital. These cases are termed as domiciliary hospitalization and are covered in a health insurance plan, if this benefit is bought with the plan.

9). Ambulance Charges

A standard health plan does not cover ambulance charges. However, when the plan is bought with this rider, ambulance charges are reimbursed to the insured.