When it comes to availing NRI medical insurance, it is important to check the health insurance riders. These may bolster your policy and help you cover various medical needs seamlessly. Let’s learn more about it below.
Understanding Health Insurance Riders
A health insurance rider is a provision that enables the expansion of coverage benefits. It offers coverage for medical expenses that are usually not covered in the base health insurance policy. You can use them to customise your plan as per your specific preferences, helping reduce out-of-pocket costs at claim time when the covered event occurs. You need to pay some added costs for each rider, although you can secure yourself and your family against multiple scenarios in life.
Common Types of Health Insurance Riders
Some of the types of health insurance riders include the following:
-
Hospital Cash – This offers a fixed and daily cash allowance for covering the cost of hospitalisation for each day. It is helpful in case of indefinite or long-term hospitalisation.
-
Maternity – These riders are helpful for those looking to start a family. They cover maternity costs, including postnatal and prenatal costs, up to a certain limit.
-
Personal Accident – These riders safeguard you and your family from the financial consequences of accidents that lead to death or disabilities.
-
Ambulance – The insurance company will cover the costs of emergency ambulance services with this rider.
-
Top-Up – These riders enable the continuation of insurance coverage even when you’ve exhausted your base policy’s sum insured. They usually offer a higher sum insured, while the premium costs are usually lower.
-
Room Rent Waiver – Many policies have room rent sub-limits. With this rider, you can get admission in any room type, irrespective of these sub-limits.
-
OPD Cover – Standard policies may not cover outpatient services like doctor visits and minor medical procedures. These riders offer reimbursements for these costs.
-
Donor Expense Cover – This rider will help you cover costs for organ transplants. It takes care of the surgery costs and hospital care of the donor, which may not be included in a standard policy.
Critical Illness Rider in Health Insurance
A critical illness rider health insurance is a helpful addition to any policy. It offers a lump-sum payout in case the policyholder is diagnosed with any such major illness. The list may include heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and so on. The amount can be spent for treatment and recovery, along with covering loss of income and daily living costs at times. You will get this fixed sum directly, irrespective of the actual treatment costs.
Benefits of Health Insurance Riders for NRIs
Some of the main health insurance rider benefits include:
-
You can easily customise your health insurance coverage based on your unique and specific requirements. This ensures that you pay only for those benefits you need, while bypassing unnecessary costs.
-
Extensive coverage is another advantage, which comes with adding more riders, thereby filling up gaps in standard policies.
-
Riders are a comparatively cost-effective option to boost your coverage without buying a new policy altogether.
-
You can also remove or modify riders based on your evolving requirements.
-
Financial security is offered by several riders in scenarios when a medical diagnosis leads to long-term disabilities, death, treatment, etc.
These are some of the key advantages worth noting in case you add riders to your health insurance plan.
How to Choose the Right Health Insurance Riders
Here are some ways to choose the best health insurance riders:
-
Evaluate your requirements – Take your lifestyle and medical history into account, along with your long-term health goals.
-
Understand the expenditure – Work out the premiums payable for each rider and whether they fit into your budget.
-
Read the terms carefully – Understand the rider terms minutely, looking out for waiting periods, exclusions, and the claims procedure.
-
Compare multiple options – Look for the riders available with every plan and compare them across insurers.
-
Coverage – Examine the scope of coverage and activation regulations.
-
Waiting periods – Check the waiting periods for specific riders like critical illness. For instance, this can be about 90 days across a majority of these riders.
-
Reputation of the provider and global coverage – If you’re an NRI, you will naturally need cross-border medical coverage, while combating medical inflation and exchange rate fluctuations. You can consider HDFC Life International’s USD-denominated health insurance plans with flexible add-ons for global protection and peace of mind.
Keep these factors in mind while choosing health insurance plan riders.
