Saturday, October 20, 2007

Adequate coverage for critical illness

An insurance adviser said that the coverage for critical illness should be adequate to cover the cost of treatment and the loss of earnings.

I know of many cases of critical illness claims, where the claimant was able to continue to work, after the illness had been treated.

If the critical illness results in death, a claim can be made under an ordinary life insurance policy (which is less costly).

My preference is for the critical illness policy to cover the cost of treatment and not to include the potential loss of earnings. This allows more of the savings to be used to earn a higher rate of return in other low-cost investment products.

5 comments:

  1. An NTUC income agent advised me that critical illness cover of an average person should be $250000. I find the amount excessively high. I wonder if the agent has exaggerated the amount? I already have $150000 critical illness cover from other policies.

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  2. 100,000 should be sufficient in my opinion. 250K is definitely far too much.

    hongjun

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  3. My preference is a small amount like $50k to cover a possible leak in our Medical Insurances and at least a 3-5 yrs of annual income.

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  4. yes, 250k is abt right with cpf medishield cover

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  5. Correct me if I am wrong. When we perceive a certain figure to be sufficient for insuring against critical illnesses, do also assume the following:

    *medical costs is rising at the same rate as inflation (not logical when medicine is not in the basket of goods for calculating CPI)As medical technology becomes more advanced, medical costs will escalate. Perhaps we'll all talk about gene therapy instead of chemotherapy. We use more expensive antibiotics today because the cheaper range is no longer effective. This has nothing to do with inflation.

    *govt subsidy for the various hospital classes in restructured hospital WILL remain the same. (this is not logical either. Faced with an aging population, the burden to subsidise the aged population will grow. Could we also be facing a longer list of 'non-std' items which are covered by govt subsidy ?

    Since when, has medical cost structure remain constant for at least 10years. It is constantly changing.

    With these in mind, how much of insurance is sufficient actually ?

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