June 1, 2011

What Do We Have to Know About Medical Insurance?

Recently, I was doing some research on the cost of insurance comparison for some of the medical card/insurance available in the market today and i stumbled upon this document. This document was compiled by one of the financial planning company and it was dated 14 September, 2010. So i guess, the medical insurance comparisons they made should be still relevant at the moment.

From the document, there are a few interesting notes that i should highlight:
  • Medical insurance attached with an Investment Linked plan as a rider offers LEVEL premium: This means, as a consumer, you will pay FIX premium through out the tenure, for your investment-linked insurance, unless the units in your investment-linked insurance are not enough to cover the rise in cost of insurance for the riders attached to your policy.
  • One does not need to disclose his/her medical history if it happened more than 10 years ago: This is new to me! If there are some insurance agents out there, please confirm whether this is true!
  • It is always a wiser choice to purchase medical benefit under an Investment Linked plan because it gives some returns at any point in time whereas there is no return if one buys standalone medical plan: This is a good reminder to potential customers out there scouting for medical cards
Consistent with the medical card comparison article that I've made previously, Allianz Powerlink MediCover seems to be the cheapest medical card across age band and sex in the market today. Another interesting comparison is that for basic medical card features (without additional fancy stuff such as deductible, waiver, or autoupgrade), it seems like Prudential's PruHealth is more costly as compared to other equivalent medical card.

So now, you have the comparison done by one of the financial planning company which comes to similar conclusion with my article. If you want to know more details about each medical card's schedule of benefits and premium table, please see the links below:
  1. Allianz Powerlink MediCover
  2. Great Eastern SmartMedic
  3. ING MediPlus
  4. AIA Excelcare Plus
Source: Financial Freedom

2 comments:

Peter Lim said...

When i read the link linking to 2009's survey, i realised the title is "Myths vs Facts", and i believe quite a number is Myths. Some of the answer is "depends".

Back to your "highlights"

1) Though the premium is fix, but that DOESN'T MEAN the premium is GUARANTEED. In short, the premium might not be enough in the future, and you might have to topup your premium to maintain the coverage.

2) You must disclose everything that is written in the form. And i have not seen any form that speficically said you don't have to disclose medical history that happened more than 10 years ago. If you do, then be prepared for "Non-payment" of claim due to non-disclosure.

3) That is on the assumption that both premiums are the same. But Investment-Linked's plan premium is definitely higher than standalone medical card plan. And when a person buys standalone, that portion of savings they saved over the investment linked premium is their savings.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that standalone is better or investment linked is better. All i'm saying is, comparison needs to made "apple-to-apple" basis. Comparison should be made on the same dollar-to-dollar. Surplus being kept under the pillow, saved, or invested, with the projected return. Then only can be compared to investment-linked's "return".

Jutamind said...

Thank you for your highlight.

Point 1: True, the premium is not guaranteed, and i've seen that premium being revised, but the revised happens for both investment-linked and standalone medical card.

Point 2: I need to check this further on this point. As for myself, I do declare any diseases that i have whether it's 10 years before or after, just to avoid any complications later on.

Point 3: Do you have any data to support your statement that premium for standalone is cheaper than investment-linked? It would be good for the readers to know this.

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