What is Health Insurance and Why is it Important?

 Nowadays, especially after COVID came into the scene, health is what everyone is prioritising before everything else. With the increasing concern of health, many people are now more focused on getting health insurance to protect their health. In this article, we’ll discover the meaning of health insurance and why it has become so important. Let’s begin with knowing the meaning of health insurance. Health insurance is an insurance type that pays overall on behalf of an individual for medical costs incurred due to any sort of illness.

These charges may involve hospitalization bills, pharmaceutical prices, medical consultation fees, etc. More precisely, health insurance always inclines to cover the insured individual’s medical, surgical, medication drugs, along with dental expenditures. Health insurance pays the care provider directly or it compensates the insured individual for expenses incurred due to illness or accident.

Health insurance is also continually encompassed in employee benefit packages as a means to persuade top talent, with premiums that are partly covered by the company but frequently withheld from employee compensations. With few limited exclusions, its cost is deductible to the payer, and the benefits that are received are mostly tax-free.

An individual can buy such insurance for a particular period by spending monthly or annual dividends in different amounts. During this precise time, if an insured individual gets involved in an unfortunate accident or gets diagnosed with a serious illness, the insurance company is there to cover the costs of the entire treatment.

Standard health insurance plans cover any medical issue that necessitates immediate hospitalization. However, claims are only considered when the sickness had not been recognized previously and the insurance plan has not been utilized yet. A health insurance plan generally covers pre-hospitalization expenses.

However, it might be a little difficult to understand health insurance, especially when you’re new to this knowledge field. The insurance plans that are overseen and supervised often require the policyholders to obtain care from a network of healthcare providers that are certified by the government. Besides, patients have to spend a huger percentage of the cost if they want to seek care outside that network. In several situations, the insurance company may even deny paying for services altogether that are out-of-network. Now that you have gotten an idea about what health insurance is, let’s proceed further with knowing why it is important.

The reasons are-

1-      Changing Lifestyle- There are numerous important reasons for an individual to have health insurance. The seismic turmoil in civilization’s way of life has provided them more vulnerable to a variety of hazardous health-related problems. Stressing work plans, bad eating habits, bad food quality, and constantly looming pollution levels have all hugely contributed to a boosted chance of cultivating health-related problems.

 

2-      Soaring Medical Expenditures- Medical costs have risen considerably in recent years after COVID took over the healthcare system. As a result, in the circumstance of a sudden medical crisis, people are forced to expend their entire funds in that only, resulting in them unknowingly compromising with their future goals. According to reports, when it comes to dealing with health issues, Indians rely mostly on their savings, hence, health insurance is important.

 

3-      Coverage of Pre- and Post-Hospitalization Charges- Not only have medical costs risen in recent years, but so have the costs of OPD (out-patient department) bills and diagnostic tests, making it even more important for people to get health insurance coverage to meet the sudden and high amounts to medical bills. It is worth knowing that medical insurance does not only covers the heavy costs of hospitalization but it also covers the outpatient care and diagnostic testing before and after the specified period of the policy.

 

4-      Other Benefits- Health insurance also provides benefits such as ambulance coverage, coverage for day-care surgeries, coverage for health check-ups, and coverage for vaccination costs.