Supplemental Health Insurance

What is Supplemental Medical Insurance?

Looking at the way the cost of health care is escalating for everyone, particularly the self-employed, supplemental health insurance is fast becoming a necessity for anyone wanting to stay not only physically but also financially healthy.  Very often your traditional insurance plan may not cover all your medical needs.  Supplemental health insurance is designed to effectively cover the gaps in your primary health insurance.  It covers the additional expenses not taken care of by your primary insurance plan, like for example, lost income due to illness, and living expenses.

Supplemental Health Insurance thus gives you additional benefits, and is especially helpful when you need to tackle huge medical bills or maybe loss of salary because of illness or injury.  Therefore, supplemental health insurance can be considered as a secondary plan that gives you extra benefits and covers additional risk.

Supplemental health insurance plans like AFLAC offer a monetary benefit to those who are out of work because of either illness or injury.  But there are a number of other insurance companies in the market as well, who have different supplementary health insurance plans providing cash benefits for many other valid reasons.

The main benefits offered by supplemental health insurance policies are lower cost because of smaller benefit amounts, cash benefits, provision for offsetting any lost income unlike traditional health insurance policies, and often even coverage for any pre-existing conditions.

Supplemental health insurance that is the most common is the one designed for people covered by Medicare.  This doesn’t cover at-home care, long term health care, nursing homes, and prescription drugs.  Therefore, many seniors prefer to have a Medicare insurance supplement as also long term care insurance for ensuring their financial security.  But sadly, these two supplemental policies can cost up to 4,000 USD a year.

Other common supplemental plans are the hospital indemnity plans that offer specific cash benefits for the covered services including any hospital stays in case of emergencies as well as outpatient services, and basic supplemental medical insurance plans that offer cash payment for covered preventive medical care.  Then, there are the supplemental cancer insurance plans providing direct cash to the policy holders for different cancer treatments and other related expenses.  For covering critical illnesses, there are policies that provide lump sum monetary benefits to make it easier to pay for out of pocket expenses incurred due to heart attacks, heart surgeries, strokes, cancer, and several other illnesses.

Another situation that can be financially disastrous for anyone or any family is becoming unexpectedly disabled.  Disability income protection provides a safety net against unforeseen lost income by offering a monthly benefit to assist in paying the bills.  For those in need of long term care, there is long term care insurance for handling the high cost of assisted living facilities, adult day care, medical home care, etc.

People who should definitely opt for supplemental health insurance include the self-employed, those financially unable to cope with inflated medical bills or unexpected time away from work, families with children, and those who are on Medicare.