During a recent LIVE webinar with KCLau.com audience, I was presenting awareness and education on medical insurance. The most common and important thing is to understand what it means by co-insurance, co-payment and deductible. Very important is because all these involves lots of money that you need pay on your own if you are admitted to hospital. As a smart consumer, we should not depend solely on insurance agents to disclose this to us – we should learn and ask the right questions instead.
Ask these 3 questions:
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Is there any co-insurance?
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Any co-payment if I upgrade room and board myself?
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Any deductible levels I can choose from?
To define this more accurately, co-insurance is expenses sharing we need to bear with the insurer, regardless of the amount of expenses.
Co-payment also means expenses sharing, but the reason this clause comes into effect is because we choose to upgrade room and board rate higher than what we are eligible for.
Deductible may or may not apply to your insurance policy, which refers to initial medical expenses we need to bear up to a certain limit BEFORE the insurance policy “kicks into effect” to reimburse any additional expenses incurred ABOVE the stated limit.
Please be reminded these 3 are all mutually exclusive. It could be one of any of the combination above.
Watch excerpts of this 1.5 hours webinar with illustration below to better understand these.
The full length recording of this webinar is available for AskCF.com subscribers – HERE
AskCF.com is a paid membership site providing proper no-holds-barred awareness and education on insurance products & comparison so that you make smarter decisions and save thousands a year in the process.
The thing about medical insurance is that some agents I know don’t like to sell medical insurance. Which is not surprising from business perspective, because throughout one’s life, there is likely many claims arising from an individual. And the servicing agent need to do service you for life without getting paid!
So, as KC Lau put, if you have a good agent or adviser who’s willing to sell you medical insurance, but also provides good service (for life, I stress this!), treasure him!
By the way, the few people who refuses to sell any medical insurance would normally belong to the other spectrum who are keen on selling you the every expensive endowment policies aka savings plan instead. For them, it makes more business sense because life insurance claims only once per lifetime – upon death!