x11r6,

neither TM nor AXA have unlimited renewal (sadly) - age limits apply. max age for AXA is 80, less for TM.

if you want true unlimited renewal, full cover of anything, guaranteed renewal etc. and you have average around 10-15k to spare per person per year you can have just that. i named the insurances that offer this before. getting in can be a bit tideous but its absolutely workable. easiest is allianz worldwide care with some limit to annual claimable amount. totally limitless is a plan from a german's abroad association BDA (but one person in the family needs to be german - i.e. not an option) Exapt@Retired, lighthouse.asia's plan is pretty damn good and rather competitively prices if 4000-8000 is fine with your budget. you can also check the likes of william russel and BUPA but frankly their policies are very expensive and not worth the fees you pay if you need cover in malaysia (no offence to the companies offering the product, it makes sense for expats hoping countries).

x11r6,

sorry. we misunderstood each other or i might not have been clear.

axa: once you're in its guaranteed renewal up to the age limit (80). they have to renew you if you can pay the (regular) premium.

TM: once you're in its guaranteed renewal after 12 months of no claims (i.e. from 2nd year onwards) up to the age limit. they have to renew you if you can pay the (regular) premium.

no other ways for the insurances to get rid of you no matter how much you claim besides the regular ones (non-payment, fraud)

i think given current pricing and restrictions this combination provides the widest cover at the lowest cost in average premium RM/sum insured - especially if you take the maximum plans for both. if there a better combo, feel free to advise once TM's policy expires there is risk involved. also if you life beyond 80, there'll be bills. if AXA doesnt extend the cover until 100 in the next 10,15 years we will be biting the bullet and switch to lighthouse.asia (hopefully in good health then so we can actually switch) since they cover until you die.

NekoRacing,

1. it's an additional premium reflecting higher risk (such as more risky employment class, preexisting illness which is not beeing excluded, etc)

2. deductable comes in two shapes:

deductable on overall claims per year: insurance pays any amount beyond X RM of total claims per year. you can claim those X RM from other places if you have additional insurance

deductable per sickness/claim: you (or other insurance) pays first X RM, insurance with deductable can claim the balance from.

3. if you are under guranteed renewal with your policy the company cannot terminate the insurance because of your claims history. as long as pay premium, are below age limit and other limits they must allow you to keep the insurance.

4. costs depend on annual limit you choose, at your age it will be a total of approx. 50 - 100 RM per month of premium cost. if you go direct you can save 15%
if you are 70, AXA max plan will set you back approx. 425 per month in todays premium. my plan is to switch to a different insurance by age of 50 if AXA is not offering this plan up to 100 years or until death. if i get sick in between i am sort of screwed but i have a special back-up-plan for that

5. i agree. i would place PA in between med and CI or at least above life too.

6. medical / CI / PA (and in my book any insurance) is the willingness to pay the average risk costs to avoid total loss scenario. it's not burnt money but converting a risk into a certainty to a degree. life doesnt necessarily pay out anything - it depends on the product you buy (consider term-life). i dont find it usefull to combine investment and insurance due to the divergent targets of both products.

NekoRacing,

1. you need to google or email axa. they will give it to yo.

2. for age 25 annual premium (before 15% discount) is RM 766 for standard risk, 245 for TM = total 1011 p.a. + 20 RM stamp duty. premium is due annually. after walk in discount you pay only 859,35 + 20 so well within your budget. less than 50% of what you accounted for. save the balance for premium increments that come with age and time!

3. yes you can go direct. just call them and let them or walk in physically once. they might try to send you to an agent, just insists you want to do it directly and bluntly demand the agent comission as discount. you *will* get it. having an agent doesnt change things at all. it just means that if you are lucky, you have someone who can do the claim for you and since they have done it more often, its easier. to the insurance it hardly makes a difference. they got staff to attend to you and they will help you if got questions. its really rather painless to claim yourself. done it myself before, only had issues with MSIG on a total loss car where we disputed the value. if you're vocal also no problem - i got full payment in the end.

4. personally i take supreme PA from MCIS cause it was the only high amount cover in the market when i was shopping. now got many alternatives, all pretty much the same. discount on PA is 25%! remember that i do agree that temporary partial disablement benefits are a good too. TM has a decent policy and so does pacific insurance if i remember correctly. it all depends on the amount of cover you need. compare the added benefits. personal liability is a good ide imho.

5. general

6. AXA is a major major player in europe (from france). no need to be scared. TM is a pretty large company from japan. also rather save. TM's hotline ppl suck big time though. if you keep control of your things its no problem though. claims are fine. dunno why the hotline ppl are so suck.

its their top-up plan yes. no need for full fledged when you take another policy without deductable.

NekoRacing,

even if it is a stone, worst that will happen is exclusion of kidney stones i guess. this is nothing serious anyway. the pain you have with the stone is worse than the pain from paying for removing it

x11r6,

you can apply for both at the same time. medic plus is designed as a topup

MaxWealth,

sure got guaranteed renewable plans - others not worth your time to look into.

jollyjoy,

tm's hotline ppl are clueless about their own products. medicplus is loading free and guaranteed renewal after an initial 12 months of claims. thereafter you're in the game. i have the policy (current) with me and there is no individual loading. there will be premium adjustments across board however as this is standard with general insurance medical cover. i suggest you get a confirmation in writing from underwriting that there is no individual loading under medicplus. i got one myself for the same reason some time ago.

if you have the option to upgrade your PRU plan you need to compare the benefits and disadvantages (average premium due annually, period and extent of coverage etc.). if you can get a single policy with the same coverage then the single policy is usually a better choice. i dont have the differences between the two policies you mentioned so its hard to say from here.

NekoRacing,

true. you dont necessary have to face an exclusion. its likely though that you get it once you disclose. you can negotiate for a loading or even an inclusion without loading depending on the medical results, likelyhood of recurring issues and your negotiation skills. for better policies its always good to get in touch with the people who insure you. they should listen to your concerns.

coolpajames,

TM is not Telekom Malaysia. it stands for Tokia Marine Insurance. and your conclusions on life time limits are plain wrong. most policies have an annual limit and a life time limit. the catch: you insure yourself early, you're more likely to eat your lifetime limit up. its no contradiction to have high life time and high annual limit per se. normally the life time limit is high will mean that the annual limit is higher than for lower lifetime limits too. of course there is no such thing as no lifetime limit (for malaysian policies) but you can go away with it to some degree (i.e. waiver of additional lifetime limit on top of the annual cap).

your statement: "all medical cards are now by default up to 99 years old" is news to me. please elaborate. it's my observation that most policies will end around 80yrs or become prohibitively expensive when covering until 99. last time i checked a policy from manulife the premium went so high so "normal" person would be able to afford the premium at high age.

coolpajames,

sure a lifetime limit means that once its reached, the policy expires. but how does this relate to your previous statement?

i am more inclined to GI medical insurances as i believe that they serve the purpose of pure medical cover better.

what i said is that the charges imposed by the insurances for covering beyong age 80 are astronomical. that holds for both standalone and life-products regardless of wether the costs in mixed through higher initial charges ("fixed"-premiums througout the period of cover) or not.

also there are in actual very few policies that offer coverage until age 99 or 100. most insurances end on or before age 80.

i also disagree on the blanket statement a comprehensive policy is more worth one's while. i'd say quite the opposite is true. if i select individual policies i can get the same cover with easy annual adjustments and with steep discounts even if i only go direct for the unlikely to have claims policies (PA/CI). i also dont waste money accumulating premiums that effectively lock me and i wont depend on investment performance. in my book the more an insurance is an insurance and not an investment product the better can the insurance serve its purpose and insure me. no offense on life - i know its popular. i just feel that seperating the covers and removing the investment link part is more practical approach. also a lot of people fail to realise that:
if the performance is not good enough, you have a problem with ILP
with traditional life the company has to be very conservative with long term income hence you tend to pay too much
with a whole life insurance it's not as easy to switch add/remove covers as needed.

yes you can add riders or remove them and there is a premium holiday but in general you're stuck with the insurance for good. with seperate insurances you enjoy much greater flexibility and you can diversify across as many insurances as you like and even swap them when much better offers come your way (take-over policy can be done). this is esp. usefull for CI cover which hardly tandems with medical cover requirements.

of course this approach has a huge minus:
you need bother about what cover you actually have and what coverage you need and you need to inform yourself to some degree.

but then again that is better than sitting on a measly 50k medical cover for 20 yrs only to realise that that was hardly enough to cover your bills.

to put it in a nutshell: i like the idea of covering the whole life but i dont like the idea of putting it in a single product. not everyone will agree and it's surely not the way to go if you decide not to bother or if you're too lazy to check your policies regularly.

higher annual is not in any way connected to lower lifetime. higher annual usually means much higher lifetime (and higher premiums).

please list the policies that cover until 99yrs. there are very few around and if the insurer decides to allocate say 20k (real example) as premium around that age: who can/wants to pay that with a policy that carries a lifetime limit?

and yes you can most certainly have a huge(or high) annual limit and no additional lifetime limit that lowers effective claimable amount. i can name you a few local and international polcies that are available for everyone that do this (lighthouseasia, AXA SCO, allianz worldwide care and a few others). its not hard to get them. its a question of premium you'll have to pay as always.

Colaboy,

your point is valid but respectable renewable cards (and i would not consider any other) will have a guaranteed renewal (renewal at the option of the insured) with a guaranteed no-loading-based-on-individual-claims / no-future-exclusions. so contract has less advantage.

of course if you know you gonna stick with the insurance contract is nice cause it balances out premiums. but given the way insurance works here (limits, exclusions, better plans pop up,...) you dont know you want to be with them forever. if you're not then you paid for the future but dont use it i.e. loose money dont you? it would be ideal if contract plans would have less limits than other plans (i.e. no lifetime limit, no annual limit or very very high ones (say 2M RM) and best of all no exclusions...)

coolpajames,

still interested in the cover until 99 yrs. i know Pru, AIA, manulife offer plans until 100 - who else? i hope more existing plans will be converted to max. age 100. personally i am waiting for AXA to do so. i am very interested to see how they will price the risk - other seem to place it around 12-17% (i.e. for every RM cover you need to pay said % per annum). does anyone have international data on this? i have ensured i am covered until 80 but for above i'll have to see the government hospital or pay myself - i dont think i'd mind paying 15-20k p.a. to have 500k or more annual cover. but i am afraid noone will want to cover me for that amount huh?

coolpajames,

right about MXM but wrong about the blanket statement on GI. not all GI policies are renewable at the discretion of the insurer. all the ones worth looking at are renewable at the discretion of the insured which makes them as good (or better) than life policies.

JerryTeh,

just not true. provide proof to your statements and dont just post empty phrases. that's as usefull as stating rhinohorn powder cures cancer because it does. unless you substantiate the post, there is no use to it. and in fact for the majority of users a medical insurance from a GI beats medical riders. they just dont know it. there are only few cases where it makes real sense to buy a medical cover as a life rider.

rockets,

i can try to put it in keywords. i think i have been to great lengths about many points already anyways.

GI

+ charges will be lower
+ comission of 15% can be saved by insuring directly with the company
+ no lock-in into specific plan or company
+ take-over-policy with other provider easy to arrange
+ not bundled you only pay what you really want
+ guaranteed renewable (other policies forget them!)
- need to monitor policy/must not forget to renew
- after big claims, hard to get *new* cover (still can renew)
- usually no upgrading as in life policies (but still can be done, mostly as new policy)
+ downgrading of plan is super easy
- limit on cover max. 80 years (what then?)

rider
+ smoother premiums (i.e. no need to safe for yourself)
+ prepayments are invested and generate returns without you having to work for it
+ often easier to upgrade within a family of policies
- rider (needs main policy which you might not want)
- normally sold in packages that cross-sell
- locked-in (high financial losses if you terminate the policy and walk to other insurer)
+ adding riders is easy (but you can also buy GI instead)
- removing riders can be costly
+ guaranteed renewable
+ longer potential cover (up to 100, GI longest i know is 80)

all plans also should not have loadings based on personal claims experience.

those are the main points that come to mind. i find the comission for medical insurance slightly obscene and am considering to move my axa policy to direct to. its the last one under agent and moving would save me several hundred bucks per year. i am not too sure about the detailed comission structure for life but yes if you tie a GI policy to an agent they get the comission every year and it sort of puts pressure on them. but the comission is way too much in my book. afterall if i make a claim i can also just seek the insurance's help. done it before and never had any issues.

anyone who wants to add to the pros/cons or discuss them please feel free. i am no agent its not my rice ball that is on the line i just prefer GI because i feel the benefits outweight the disadvantages.

i mean what happens if i decide to cancel a medical rider. of course it would reduce the premium but i would also incur losses in terms of sunken costs that have been contributed while i had the cover and which where meant to cover for the future as well. so in that sense it's sort of a costly undertaking. correct me if i am wrong there.

ajau,

my research has shown that the cost for insurance per RM of lifetime cover is cheaper pretty much across board. and this makes perfect sense simply because premiums are not guaranteed and hence life insurance must commit to its forward estimation on premiums while general insurance can adjust. this leads to a lower margin of error and hence cheaper premium. and on top you can get additional 15% less by going direct. this translates to a significant saving of around 20% or more depending on what cover you choose. of course some GI covers are priced very high as well and give little price advantage over life or none at all. but those can be singled out.

the two points you rised are very important (1. Guaranteed renewal and 2. Premium/Charges will not increase based on number of claim made per individual cases) and i will be very open here by saying the following:

ANY medical insurance that does not offer those two points is junk and a waste of your money. DONOT buy such insurances - they are not really insurances because the insurance chose not to bear the risk it should bear.

I have always and only considered solely products that offer both points and there are plenty of options that remain in the general insurance market.

I think the question standalone or rider is the next consideration i.e. point 3 once conditions 1 and 2 are fullfilled. Mainly because of the implications that arise from comitting.

The next step would be premiums i.e. what is the best deal for my premium.

the other important things to look for we have discussed before and i totally agree:

1. annual limit should be as high as possible
2. life time limit dito (or none at all)
3. totally agree - sublimits suck but are usually used by the insurances that also dont honor the two most important questions (guranteed renewable & no personal loading) so they are usually out of the game long before
4. the amount i have to pay certainly is important as well! due diligence when buying applies i guess.

i used to enjoy a really great unlimited cover for many many years but eventually changed due to financial considerations (premium of 5k p.a. at age 20 and 20k at age 50 felt a bit silly eventually).
and i have to be honest the fact that all of a sudden limits are an issue didnt make me feel to comfy but if limits are set sufficiently high, the risk of exceeding them can be minimised. which is why i have a rather large budget for pure health care and have allowed for a burst with additional deductable cover. with my current company cover + AXA SCO 500 + TM MedicPlus max plan i can claim roughly 1M per annum on "burst mode" which is pretty good i assume.

i agree with you that GI cover is great to fill gaps. but i dont agree that ILP is the way to go. its eyecandy in a way because it uses projected returns which might or might not come true. also - i am not sure for which insurances this currently applies - i have come across some policies (namely manulife and a plan from AIA i believe) which had interesting fineprint: premiums were not really guaranteed but could be adjusted based on portfolio claims experience just the same as GI policies. so the whole idea of fixed premiums was not really true. maybe some agents can shed some light there?

i also am of the opinion that an ILP or classic life policy might give me a whole lot of covers that are not really needed. this and that rider is added to fill a annual premium requirement and the actual cover for the areas that matter is small.
i have seen friends covers who thought they got a good one cause the premium was like 3000+ p.a. and then it turned out to have actual cover for health of 50k and CI of 100k. and those where the areas which they thought they had covered well. the money was however allocated for entirely other things. not saying this is always the case but combo-offers are usually confusing and people end up with stuff they didnt really want cause they didnt really grasp what was beeing offered to them.

can i ask you, how did you compare the medical card premiums? same cover product once as standalone and once as rider? accumulate premiums as NPV over the full period of possible cover and then average it to annual premium? if so i'd be interested to see the values. i am always open to better offers for my medical cover

ajau,

agreed its not easy to compare but your comparison lacks serious consideration:

if you want to compare premiums between the two alternatives then you need to look at the overall period of possible cover since this is the basis of calculation for the rider. also a medical insurance is long term so you should compare the total costs for the insurance cover and calculate the net-present-value (NPV) of the total premiums payable for the entire period of cover.

the problem is finding two identical plans. but that can be overome if we look at two almost identical plans that offer the same lifetime maximum. that way the maximum amount claimable is the same as as such the maxium loss to the insurer is identical. using this as a proxy we can calculate the total costs for a rider policy and a GI policy by summing premiums from the the beginning (ideally age 0) to the maximum coverage period (if they differ we have a small problem but we can then choose to calculate until the mimum insurable duration.

we can probably assume an inflation rate of 3% - since we discount both premiums the same way it wont really matter if 3% is spot on or not.

if you then compare the NPV you have a good idea of which one is cheaper. if the lifetime limit differs then you can always divide the NPV of the premium by life time limit * 1000 to get the NPV of premiums due for 1000 RM worth of lifetime limit. this also allows a certain degree of comparison.

however the laws of statistics and econometrics dictate in advance that the premium calculation for a fixed rate vs. a floating rate must be higher to allow the premium to be correct in a given percentile. and the longer into the future the higher that margin of error-allocation will be. this is the problem with riders that carry a fixed premium. the insurer has to overcharge to avoid undercharging. and since they dont know the future, someone has to cover that particular risk by means of higher premiums (i.e. the insured).

if i have time, i'll calculate the NPV of a few GI policies but right now i am pretty swamped with work so i might be slow.

its not about the cheapest. the statement is that in general (and for the vast majority of all policies) a rider will have to be more expensive than the same cover from a GI policy. there might be exeptions but that should from a risk management point of view be an "accident". there might however be advantages other than monetary that justify to opt for a rider (i.e. i really want a all-in-one-policy).

i think if we look at a list of serious polcies (i.e. the ones that cover the basic criteria) then we can make a choice from that pool with respect to budget and cover. my point is just that for a 1:1 cover GI (in econometric theory and most likely in real life) will always be cheaper than the same product as a fixed premium rider.

any serious standalone card has guaranteed renewal and no-individual loading clause. others are junk. that doesnt mean standalone is a no go - a good one is actually better than one linked inside a life plan.