A Comprehensive Guide For Add-Ons in Health Insurance

Health insurance coverage is essential for people of all ages as it protects the family from any healthcare crisis and makes you financially resilient to such mishaps. However, your regular healthcare plan won’t cover everything. This is where you need services like health insurance add-ons, which can fill in any specific need, and you can tie it up with your existing healthcare plan. 

Enrich Your Existing Health Insurance Plan With Add-Ons

Health insurance add-ons, also known as riders, are the additional paid coverage you can add to your existing policy and expand your health insurance policy coverage. There are various advantages of getting add-ons meaning you can have multiple services attached to your policy or protect your cover from recurrent claims or inflation. 

Reasons To Get Health Insurance Add-Ons

Some of the key benefits of having health insurance add-ons are as follows: 

• Affordable premium – Add-on cover with the base plan is more affordable than buying another health plan. The IRDAI has directed that all insurance companies shall not charge more than 30% of the base policy premium as the add-on cover cost. 
• Customised coverage – You can customise your base coverage option with add-on covers as per your need and preference.  
• Broader policy coverage – With add-ons, the coverage base of health insurance plans increases to facilitate its benefits to the policyholder. 

List of Add-Ons Offered With Health Insurance

Add-ons can help you expand your insurance coverage, and you can choose one from the following list if you want to use it. 

List of add-ons

• Alternative methods of treatment – Ayurveda, Unani, Yoga, Homeopathy and Siddha are also covered as modes of treatment in health insurance plans. 
• Day care procedure – Cover for the treatment you undertook within 24 hrs in a hospital. 
• Consumable cover – This add-on will protect you from the consumable components of your hospitalisation bill, which may comprise a major chunk if you are hospitalised for major surgeries. Consumables include the cost of gloves, masks, syringes, surgical clothes, etc. 
• No claim bonus safeguard – protects no claim bonus from claims and keeps your cover intact even if you avail claim in any policy period. 
• Home care treatment – Covers the cost of treatments at home. 
• Inflation shield – protects policy from inflation by adjusting coverage amount. This ensures that you don’t pay a high premium on rainy days. 
• Domestic road ambulance – Covers the transportation cost via an ambulance in case of an accident. 
• Maternity cover – This add-on covers expenses related to prenatal and postnatal care such as the cost of ambulance, medications and also newborn baby cover.
  

When to choose these add-ons

These additional health insurance benefits can be attached to the policy either at the time of purchase or yearly on the purchase date. 

How add-ons can impact your premium?

According to the guidelines of IRDAI, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, the premium for all the add-ons to be availed in a health insurance policy cannot exceed thirty per cent of the premium amount. 

For example, if you have bought a health insurance plan with Rs 1000 as an annual premium for a sum of Rs 500000. If you have five add-ons on this, then your premium for add-ons cannot be more than Rs 300 as per IRDAI guidelines. 

Do not under-insure or over-subscribe to add-ons

Add-ons can be a good thing, but they will burden you with an additional premium every year. However, you can save yourself from this burden by deciding the kind of services you need and by doing a good health plans comparison to find the one best suited for you or your family.

You should only opt for add-ons above your health insurance benefits when additional coverage is needed to fulfil your medical needs and the premium amount fits your budget. 

Key Takeaways

Healthcare policies today cover most of the features that add-ons will offer. However, these plans will come at a heavy cost. Therefore, if you want to be more selective about coverage, you can get a cost-effective policy and include the health insurance add-ons according to your medical needs. However, you need to check whether the final premium amount is viable for you. Additionally, platforms like PhonePe offer unlimited convenience and a seamless insurance purchase experience.