One of the luckiest things to happen with me, is that I wasn’t hit with anything big before I made a health insurance purchase. Thankfully, nothing has happened ever since.

Why buy health insurance?

The idea is simple, we’re hedging against risk. Health insurances are not investments. They’re risk hedges.

Imagine if you were a married mad with kids. You have your day job, and so does your wife. Now, you want to take a dip into entrepreneurship. What’s a responsible way to do this?

First, create a surplus of savings that are your safety buffer in case things go south. This buffer is defined based on your monthly income and the amount of time you intend to dedicate to trying your entrepreneurship journey.

Now imagine if you had to make a safety buffer against the worst diseases, think of a rare cancer, or a heart disease that requires a bypass surgery.

Ideally, when you start earning, you would want to save money for this first, just in case it ever happens.

Of course, to actually do it this way would be insane, because the odds of such a disease happening to you are very low. And your money would have been wasted waiting for an event that’s probably and hopefully never going to happen.

That’s where health insurance comes in. For a fractional price of what you’d have otherwise saved, you can get a coverage against such health risks. So that, first, you don’t have to worry about saving so much money and second, the money you do save, can be invested to build wealth.

In short, a health insurance is like a protective guard that you purchase, in case you’re hit with a health crisis, so that health crises don’t drain you out.

Which health insurance to buy

To approach this problem, I researched Youtube videos to understand the different parameters to consider while purchasing insurance.

Apart from which insurer to buy from, there are other critical questions to answer, like:

How much coverage to consider?

How to redeem the insurance coverage in case of a medical exigency?

Based on all the online research, I created this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13b6P-f4Vx-IPSgGbdyw7uI8kfoA2rUq1WoUYz9GVdCI/edit?gid=97826671#gid=97826671

In this sheet, I’ve listed down:

• All the relevant factors to consider while buying insurance (ex: coverage amount)
• The meaning of those factors (ex: how much money you’ll get if you face a crisis)
• The recommended value to be taken for that factor (25 Lakhs per person for Senior citizens)

I’ve also added:

• A sheet to add details of all the people to be insured as this will guide the decision making
• Columns to compare different insurance policies from different insurers

Based on all of these information, I found out that the best insurance for me and my sister, who live in Bangalore is Max Bupa, while for my parents, it’s HDFC Ergo.

I recommend that anyone who wants to use this document, should also first go through the effort of doing the research themselves. Because, with times, the rules and regulations around health insurance would have changed.

So it’s important to take a decision based on an updated understanding matrix.

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