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The financial burden bestowed upon families owing to the spiraling cost of healthcare spares no room for leaving your health to chance. Especially for working professionals, the best bet is to opt for critical illness insurance as early in life as possible.
This is because working professionals in India are known to lead the most contorted lifestyles. They don’t do it by choice; instead, the work they do forces them to change their lifestyle choices. This increases their chances of falling prey to many critical ailments. If you are a working professional, it’s important to have a critical illness insurance in your portfolio. Read on to know why.
Benefits of a critical illness insurance cover
- Provides financial muscle to deal with astronomical costs of treatment
Treatment of critical ailments such as cancer, stroke, etc., warrants substantial funds. Depending on the severity of the disease, the costs can easily run into several lakhs of rupees. For instance, the cost of treating cancer can go upwards of Rs.10 lakh. A critical illness insurance policy gives you the financial muscle to deal with the high costs associated with treatment.
A critical ailment can dry up your entire savings in no time. However, a critical illness insurance plan prevents out-of-pocket expenses, thus protecting your hard-earned savings from getting wiped out instantaneously.
- Helps you meet other liabilities
Generally, working professionals take loans in the form of car, home and even travel, among others. It’s important to pay EMIs of loans on time. A default can lead to financial and emotional stress. However, as critical ailments require a substantial sum of money, meeting the liabilities mentioned above can be a tall order.
A critical insurance cover can help you meet these liabilities along with day-to-day needs of the family with ease. As these are fixed benefit plans, which offer a lump sum on diagnosis of the ailment, they help you meet all commitments with ease.
- An alternate source of income in times of need
This is one of the major critical illness insurance benefits. Some plans provide a certain percentage of the sum insured as monthly income, for a certain number of years. Note that recovering from critical ailment takes a lot of time and it can impair your ability to earn.
In such a scenario, the money received from the policy keeps you financially-sound and ensures you and your family can address their needs without much headache.
- Guards you from sliding into a debt trap
There have been cases where the aggrieved family have had to sell their assets and borrow at a high rate of interest to arrange funds for treatment. This pushes them into a debt trap, coming out of which is a long and arduous journey.
However, a critical illness cover prevents you and your family from sliding into this trap. With adequate funds, it becomes easy to take care of pre- and post- hospitalisation expenses. Note that there are critical illness insurance plans, which cover post-hospitalisation expenses for up to 6-8 months.
Before buying a critical illness insurance plan, make sure to compare various policies online on aggregator portals. Choose the sum insured carefully and have a close look at the number of diseases covered. Do check out the payout structure and read the terms and conditions well before settling for one. Also, check out the waiting period and fill up the proposal form correctly with all the accurate details.
While a critical illness insurance policy gives you the required funds to deal with the condition, you can supplement it through hospital cash cover from Bajaj Finserv. An offering of the company’s Pocket Insurance portfolio, it offers daily cash benefits up to Rs. 1,000 at an affordable premium. You can get maximum coverage of Rs. 10,000.
