Health insurance can protect against lifestyle diseases?

Ailments like diabetes, cardiovascular anomalies, obesity, respiratory problems, etc. which were more commonly found in the middle to older ages are now rampant among the youth of India. Sedentary lifestyle, increased levels of stress, improper diet, lack of nutrition, high dependence on junk food, etc. have spelled doom for the health of the modern generation of individuals.

A report prepared by the WHO and World Economic Form depicts India incurring a loss of about $237 billion by 2015 because of the rising incidence of lifestyle ailments and wrong diets. Open your eyes around your own neighborhood and you would find adults in their 20s or 30s complaining about increased blood pressure, hypertension, stress, diabetes, obesity and what not. So where does health insurance feature in all of this?

Health insurance actually plays a very central part in this scenario. Health insurance provides financial assistance in case of medical contingencies and since lifestyle diseases are on the rise, the relevance of a health plan is more necessary now than ever before. There are two major reasons which necessitate a good medical insurance plan:

The increasing burden of diseases
The increasing cost of treating such diseases.

Modern technology has made great advancements in the field of medicine and though the lifestyle diseases are curable, one should factor in the cost of such cure. Advanced treatments and prescription drugs come costly and so health insurance becomes a much needed relief. In this scenario, there are certain steps one should take to emerge a winner on the health insurance front.

Buy Young - Lifestyle disease strike everyone irrespective of the age and youngsters are more prone to contracting them due to their fast lifestyle. Investing in a good health insurance plan early in your life is the best course of action. Why? Well, there are two reasons. One, the plan comes cheaper when your age is low and many insuers continue to give you the price advantage as you grow older. Two, there is a pre-existing waiting period in the plan which would exclude coverage of pre-existing disease in the first few years of the policy. The waiting period would be over when you are healthy and you can thereafter enjoy an exhaustive coverage which would prove useful when you actually fall ill due to any disease.
Don’t be Stingy on the Coverage Amount - Just buying a health plan is not enough, having the optimum coverage is also important. Since medicine costs are inflating at a worrying rate, having a good coverage is required if you do not want your finances to suffer. If affordability is an issue, you can buy a lower coverage and gradually increase it in later years. Or you can buy a lower coverage and supplement it with a super top-up plan which would effectively increase the coverage and would also be lighter on the pocket.
Buy an Exhaustive Policy - With so many plans available in the market, don’t make the mistake of settling on one which has a limited scope of coverage. Search the market, contact your broker for an unbiased advice and invest your hard-earned money in a plan which has an all-round coverage. After all, the health insurance plan you choose could cover your medical expenses and associated risk for 40-60-or even 80 years going forward

Health insurance should not be avoided if you are young and have not already contracted one of the lifestyle diseases. Instead, you should actually invest in a good health plan as early as possible to get a good deal on the premium and an exhaustive coverage after the waiting period.

Seek the help of a broker or a good online platform for landing on the best plan for your requirements. Lifestyle diseases are becoming very common and though you can adopt a healthy lifestyle, you cannot guarantee to be aloof from them. Have a health insurance plan and leave the financial worry to the insurer, after all, you already have a lot of other things to worry about, don’t you?