Every family has different medical and lifestyle needs. While members can manage lifestyle changes for better living, security against medical emergencies need careful planning.  And an essential safeguard for your family against health emergencies comes with comprehensive family health insurance plans. With a pool of emergency funds, you can manage your medical budget while availing of value-added insurance benefits like no-claim bonus, recharge of sum insured, and annual health check-ups, among others.

Yet, with a slew of benefits to choose from, it becomes challenging to find the right fit of health insurance for your family. In this article, let’s discuss some crucial factors that will help you close on the right family cover.

10 Vital Things to Know Before Buying a Health Insurance Policy for Your Family

1. Consider Your Family’s Healthcare Needs:  When adding your dependent children or parents under a family floater health cover, you must consider their personal healthcare needs. For instance, enhance their policy with coverage for pre-existing diseases, or ensure critical illness coverage for your children from an early age.
2. Evaluate Your Number of Family Members: Ideally, family floater plans are affordable for younger families with the eldest member’s age between 30 to 40 years. However, if you wish to secure your 60-year-old parents, consider securing them under a separate senior citizen cover. This will help you lower the premium costs while ensuring unrestricted coverage for your elders.
3. Go for Comprehensive Coverage: Choose a family floater offering comprehensive coverage to all the insured members. Look for benefits up to the sum insured, including in-patient hospitalisation, pre and post-hospitalization, pre and post-hospitalisation expenses, diagnosis, AYUSH treatment, advanced treatments, and more. This dentist who does dental veneers in Harrisburg also advises that you get dental as supplemental coverage. Cheapest health insurance does not include this although it’s an important aspect of your overall health. 
4. Compare the List of Network Hospitals: To ensure you don’t run out of funds during a medical emergency, always look for a family floater plan with the maximum cashless hospitalisation network. This will help you settle the claims directly between the insurer and the hospital without shedding your pockets.
5. Consider Your Family’s Medical History: Some hereditary diseases can continue to put other family members at risk. Thus, you should ensure the family health plan has adequate coverage for such conditions and ailments.
6. Look for Higher CSR: The higher the claim settlement ratio, the more credible the health insurer is. So, don’t forget to compare the reliability factor by checking the past 2-3 year’s claim settlement ratio of the top insurers.
7. Check the Waiting Period: Compare the waiting period of different family floater plans to check how long you need to wait before you can file a medical claim. The earlier you secure your family under a family floater cover, the better.
8. Compare Premium: Affordability is an important factor. Use the online health insurance premium calculator to get an estimated premium amount for your family floater policy, so that you could identify cheap health insurance plans.
9. Check Exclusions: Exclusions are the conditions and treatments that are not admissible for a claim under the policy. Check them carefully and opt for a family health plan with minimum exclusions.
10. Look for Value-added services: When maintaining the health and finances of your family, more than medical insurance is needed. You need a family cover offering online doctor consultancy, annual health check-ups, no-claim bonus, and automatic recharge of the sum insured. These value-added benefits ensure that you boost your security coverage without stretching your budget.

Keeping in mind the above-mentioned factors will help you secure your family for a long time. One of the health insurers offering such optimum benefits is Care Health Insurance. With a high claim ratio of 95.2%, the insurer has a wide network of cashless hospitals across India. The best part is its wide-ranging family health insurance plans starting with 5 lakh coverage and going as high as 6 crores. With customisable and unique features, the family health plans by Care Health Insurance are reliable picks for every type of household need and budget. So, check out their official website to learn more about their family covers.