Is your corporate health insurance enough?

The resounding answer from my recent experience is a NO!!

Lots of people think that the insurance that their companies give them are enough for their medical coverages for a lifetime. A four lakh family floater plan sounds really good and hence there is never any real reason to get any more cover.

I have just come out from an health experience - a heart surgery and luckily though i had a 3 lakh cover, i still needed to shell out another lakh from my pocket to cover a angioplasty with just one stent ( can you imagine that a stent actually costs around 128000 rs??


As we have a family and also grow older the probability of getting admitted in the hospital with more complicated and costly diseases is much more.

Now lets do a quick calculation.

An angioplasty will cost anywhere between 4-5 lakhs for around two stents. If you do have this, your insurance is completely gone for a year for your family- if your insurance has just started. This is usually the limit to which you have company covered insurance ( dont forget the 10% copay that every company now has).

So the above calculation give you an instance of how your insurance coverage is really not enough.

So how much is really enough?

I think for a family of three to four- around six lakhs ( without any co pay) is decent.


Now i would suggest a little bit of strategy of how you buy the insurance. Buy it in tranches... Maybe six months apart.. This way even if you have a admission, you will not suddenly have a gap of no insurance.

Lets take a quick example

1. Four lakhs starting on jan first.
2. Two lakhs starting june first.

So at any point of time, you have six lakhs of insurance. Now if you get admitted and spend around 5 lakhs in february.. You now have taken away all of your insurance from 1. And around a lakh from 2. So in february, you have only one lakh of insurance left.

Now as soon as you hit june.. This will jump back to two lakhs because of the fact that it gets regenerated .

If you can have an equal distribution.. Nothing like it.

So the entire post is actually about the fact that you need to ensure you have the right leelof health insurance and not depend only on your company insurance. If you do have your spouse working... Take the entire coverage- then it may not be an issue


Now if you can ensure you buy from a company which gives you money back ( eg amway tie up with royal sundaram).. Even better

Take a note.. Its simplefinancialsense