If you have decided to buy health insurance, you couldn’t have made a better decision! Ideally, the next step followed by this decision is to evaluate your budget and financial capacity. Thereafter, you are set to compare best health insurance plans across different insurance providers and make your final choice. However, there are a number of important parameters to compare health insurance plans to help you choose one of the best plans as per your requirement.

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We have listed below the important parameters to help you compare best health insurance plans:

  1. Types Of Health Insurance Policies

There are a number of health insurance products available in the market. To have a fair idea, you can compare basic health insurance plans. Depending on your requirement, you can choose from individual health insurance, family floater policy or senior citizen policy. After choosing the suitable type of insurance, you can compare its features and benefits across different insurance providers. 

  1. Lifetime Renewability

It is advisable to compare health insurance plans based on age limit till which they can be renewed. It is beneficial to choose one with lifetime renewability, as you need your best health insurance to support you more in the later years life. This way, you can have your young age as well as old age covered under the same health insurance plan.

  1. Waiting period

Waiting period is the duration right after signing up for the policy, during which you cannot file a claim. This period varies from 2 years to 4 years, depending on your current health status. If you have any pre-existing ailments, the waiting period might be longer. Nonetheless, depending on your medical specifications, you can choose the insurance plan with a minimum waiting period. 

  1. Coverage 

This is one of the most important bases of comparison. You must compare health insurance plans based on coverage of expenses, inclusions, and exclusions. Find below a few expenses which are usually covered:

  • Pre-Hospitalization Expenses: The expenses incurred during 30/60 days before admission of the patient to the hospital.
  • In-Patient Treatment Expenses: These expenses include ICU charges, nursing charges, medical charges, room rent, other consumable expenses, etc. If these are uncovered, it might increase your medical bill by a considerable amount.
  • Post-Hospitalization Expenses: The expenses to be incurred during 60/90 days after the date of discharge of the patient, like follow-ups, tests, medicine, etc. 
  • Day Care Procedures: A few treatments are performed within 24 hours. Therefore, some insurance providers also cover certain day-care treatments, which do not require hospitalization.
  • Domiciliary Treatment: Under this, treatment takes place at home instead of a hospital, mainly under two conditions:
  1. When patient is not in a state of moving to the hospital
  2. Non-availability of rooms in the hospital
  1. Claim Settlement Ratio

To ensure the credibility of the insurance provider, it is important to compare health insurance plans based on their claim settlement ratio. It depicts the claims settled by the insurance provider in the past. It is preferable to choose one with the maximum claim settlement ratio.

  1. Network Hospitals

Generally, insurance providers offer a cashless claim benefit only if the policyholder is admitted and treated in one of their network hospitals. It is beneficial to choose one with the maximum number of network hospitals so that you would have more number of hospital options.

  1. Analysis of Premium vs Coverage

Lastly, it is imperative to compare the premium and the coverage parallelly. A best health insurance plan with a lower premium might not provide adequate coverage; therefore, it is important to compare both of them.

For buying one of the best health insurance plans, it is advisable to choose one of the credible insurance providers like TATA AIG. They offer maximum benefits possible depending on your financial capacity and exclusively mention their terms and conditions to avoid issues later. Besides, they offer end-to-end assistance to their clients and ensure to settle the claim as soon as possible.