If you are soon going shopping for health care insurance cover, you may find a discussion on what goes into the making of good health insurance cover useful. After all, as you will probably realize, your health insurance purchase is a very important one; one that can have very great implications in your financial life. As such, it is a purchase decision that you won’t want to get wrong.
Now in a nutshell, good health insurance cover is one that ‘provides you with peace of mind at a reasonable price.’ Yes, when you buy the health insurance cover, what you are actually purchasing is peace of mind. So the two elements that make up good health care insurance cover arise out of that assertion: peace of mind and reasonable pricing. These two can be further divided so that we come up with three qualities of good health insurance cover:
1. Adequate coverage: it is from this that we would go on to get the ‘peace of mind.’ You may get insurance, but if there is a huge range of conditions it doesn’t cover – so that the risk of your falling ill and being unable to access good quality health care still exists – then you would know that you wouldn’t be getting true peace of mind. Ideally, if you can afford it, and you end up with a health care insurance cover that caters for pretty much every imaginable health condition that you are at risk of, you would be getting real peace of mind. But since that ideal of having health insurance that caters for everything is pretty much unattainable for most of us, the best we can do is opt for health insurance that gives a ‘reasonable’ level of coverage
2. Trustworthiness: in order for ‘peace of mind’ part of the health care insurance equation to come true, it is important to ensure that you get the health insurance from trustworthy providers. In this regard, there are two things you should check out. The first is the health insurance provider’s record of claim payments. You can’t have peace of mind when you know that the guys you bought health care insurance from have a tendency to bounce or delay claims on legitimate conditions covered by them. Neither can you have peace of mind when you know that your insurance provider is experiencing financial difficulties and may not be in a position to finance your health care, in spite of their willingness to. So how do you ensure that the health policy you buy aces all these tests? The key would be to engage in good research, before buying into any insurance policy.
3. Reasonable pricing: unless you are one of those lucky individuals who have all the money they ever need, chances are that you will also want to know what price you are purchasing the health care insurance at. Ideally, the cost of insurance should be roughly reflective of what you would otherwise spend on health care cost, so that even on your end, the whole transaction makes financial sense. That way, you would be spending on health insurance what you would otherwise spend on health care anyway. But in this case, you would have the added advantage that you more or less ‘invest’ the money, so that whatever the state of your finances when happen to fall ill, you can access decent health care without a care on how you would go on to finance it.
