A critical illness policy is a limited indemnity plan that pays a set cash amount in the event of a covered illness. These plans are designed to supplement your health insurance policy by helping to pay for the deductible and out of pocket. For example, if you had a $5000 deductible on your health insurance, a $5000 critical illness policy would pay the cost of that deductible in the event of a covered illness.
What kinds of Critical Illness Policies do we offer?
There are various critical illness plans available, however, the one we currently recommend to our clients is the Humana Critical Illness cash plan. The Humana plan is more competitively priced and pays for a wider range of illnesses than its competitors, thus ensuring more complete coverage.
What does the plan cover?
The Humana CI cash plan works as follows: it has a fixed premium for life and three illness categories (vascular, cancer, and other), paying up to the full benefit amount for each category. For example, if a covered person were to have a heart attack, the plan will pay the full benefit amount for the “vascular” category (less a $100 deductible to activate the policy). At that point, the covered person would still have 100% of the benefit available for cancer and other illnesses, but the benefit for vascular conditions would have been used. If instead, the covered person had a bypass, the plan would pay 25% of the vascular benefit, and the other 75% would still be available for future use.
There are other critical illness plans that do not exhaust the benefit amount in this manner, but they tend to exclude the most common forms of cancers, such as breast, cervical, or prostate cancer. We find that the more complete coverage that the Humana plan offers is well worth the price.