What is health insurance & Its Policy?
'Happiness lies, first of all, in health.' - George William Curtis
Health insurance guarantees payments to a person in the event of sickness or injury and works as protection scheme.
Health insurance is protection, scheme to take care of health of a person and works it works by buying a policy from a company or an insurance agent. Depending on the premium paid the health insurance policy will pay specified amounts for the medical expenses incurred to overcome the health problem.
Currently the trend of some of the reputable companies seems to be to build in a health insurance policy as a benefit to an employee. Some countries offers free health insurance to their citizen. In India certain sectors like railways, army and the employees working with the central government are covered in a health scheme provided cover to almost 20 million people in different part of the country.
Health like education should be essential and should be freely available to all the citizens of a country. Some developed countries realizing the importance of the health of the nation spend as much as 6% to 8% of their GDP on it and have advanced facilities in their government run hospitals. Some examples include the United Kingdom where the National Health Services hospitals provide all the health requirements to majority of their citizens. Sweden and Norway follow similar government run health schemes.
As per the census of USA in the year 2004, it was noted that 245.3 million people had health insurance coverage; however 45.8 million lived without an insurance cover. In response to some of these stats Senator John Kerry said.
"Great physicians and nurses, skilled, caring and unparalleled in their training, intervened in my life and probably saved it. I was lucky but other Americans are not. It is time to speak again and stand again for the ideal that in the richest nation ever on this planet, it is wrong for 41 million Americans, most of them in working families, to worry at night and wake up in the morning without the basic protection of health insurance."
Developing countries like India have priority of spending in other sectors like the army and the infrastructure development and barely 2% of the GDP is spent on the health and results in the government hospitals lack in facilities especially for any advanced procedures such as heart surgery or hip replacement.
Health insurance schemes are particularly important for individuals from the lower income group to provide them and their family members with adequate cover in event of any mishap or illness. The escalating medical costs are due to the advanced diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that have become the hallmark of modern medical care. An insurance scheme will guarantee that no compromises are made in your treatment for wants of funds.
Remember when negotiating a policy you ask for adequate cover as the provided by the health insurance will depend on the type of policy purchased.
'Our health always seems much more valuable after we lose it' - Unknown Author
