Health Insurance – When people talk about health cover, they may be speaking about one of three very significantly different types of protection:
– Some people may refer to health insurance
in the context of private medical insurance – sometimes known by its acronym of PMI;
– This essentially offers policyholders the opportunity to have non-critical treatment at a hospital of their choice and rather more quickly than may occasionally be possible through the NHS;
– Typical policy benefits may include things such as a private room, fast access to the top consultants in their field, rapid treatment and options for outpatient, psychiatric and physiotherapy treatments;
– You may find that pre-existing conditions may not be covered and critical or chronic conditions may continue to be dealt with by the National Health Service;
– This sort of cover may allow you and your family peace of mind and in terms of protecting your financial situation, getting fast remedial treatment may enable you to recover your health that bit sooner and get back to your normal job;
– Other people when referring to health cover may be talking about a form of insurance that offers financial assistance in the event that you are unable to earn income due to ill health;
– There are, in fact, two quite different forms of this type of insurance,
- payment protection insurance or PPI;
- income protection insurance.
– As the name suggests, PPI is a type of cover that acts to protect some of the key regular payments that make your lifestyle possible.
Those may differ from one person or family to another but might typically include things such as mortgages, HP payments, school fees and car finance contributions etc;
– Bear in mind that this type of income insurance may not act to protect you from the consequences of your own actions.
So if you resign, are dismissed, take study leave, opt for a career break or injure yourself during participation in a criminal activity, you may find that your policy might not cover such circumstances;
– Some people may understandably be concerned about what would happen to them and their loved ones, should they be taken critically or seriously ill and be unable to work in the foreseeable future. Income protection insurance exists to help with this type of situation;
– Such a policy may payout up to 65 percent of your normal gross salary on an ongoing basis (up until your retirement date) should one of a specified range of conditions stop you from working;
– As a general principle, income protection cover may not operate in circumstances relating to redundancy – it may only provide cover for an ongoing inability to work due to sickness or possibly accident;
– if some of the above problems happen to you, your financial commitments will be unlikely to spontaneously disappear and that is why it might be prudent to find out more.