chew_ronnie,

i agree there is one-fits-all solution. i guess this also very much depends on your healthcare budget. if you cant afford the old-age premium it's no use taking a high coverage plan. sadly malaysia does not provide a uniform coverage as in europe where the insurers compete by price and additional benefits (rehab, private room etc).

i can understand your remarks and i can accept them. but i feel that seperating insurances and not bundling them allows you for better flexibility. say i buy a med+crit.ill.+ILP with death and TPD - if i need to change any one of those components i am first of bound by the offers of one company only (cant get the best deals anymore) and i am more often than not stuck with what i have. cancelling such combi products is often accompanied by a big loss. that is why i like to split the insurances and the investments and this is also why i dont combine med.insurance with death and TPD. it's just easier - i can assess the policies annually and switch where it seems necessary. also you can easily plan for old age - i wont need death and TPD coverage to the same degree i need it now in 30 years. i might only need TPD after all

with respect to your advice for guranteed renewable plan: this is essential! i absolutely agree - never ever take a policy whose renewal is up to the company. you will regret it if major claims happen. also make sure there will never be personal loading after you have been accepted. anything less is not worth the paper the wording is printed on.

and i appreciate your comments on the med.ins. for kids - i totally agree. dont confuse death and crit.ill. with a medical insurance - those are different things alltogether and they do cover different risks.

personally i dont have critical illness cover since we deem the med. costs will be covered by the insurance. of course the lump sum might be used to cover for the fact that you cant work and as such makes sense if you are employed. if you have assets to dispose (i.e. a business or the like) it might be viable to continue the business with an extra employee so you can get payments from this or you might be able to sell it and get a lump sum payment this way.

but it reminds me that i still need to get crit. ill. cover for my daughter - despite the lien rule

numbertwo,

i am not sure i know all that much. i just did some research and formed an opinion. i hope i right (or close to it) but i will most likely only find out if i really need the medical insurance. hopefully i wont have to find out though.

i didnt say CI is mandatory. actually i believe it has nothing to do with the issue of medical insurance at all. the medical insurance should be chosen such that i will also pay for the required medical costs that arise from any critical illness (not just the 36 you can buy extra insurance for). this of course does not hold for AIDS since no insurance company in malaysia covers this through a medical card. but that is alltogether a different issue.

why is CI usefull? if you do have one of those 36 CIs - say a severe stroke - you might find yourself in a position that you can no longer work. if you are employed and you were looking at another 30 years of hard labour then you are in trouble. this is where a cleverly chosen CI insurance can help you by paying a lumpsum that closes the gap between your working life and retirement. as such the coverage should be enough for an instant retirement. to allow for this, it has to very very high at young age and then gradually go down to zero coverage at age 65 or whatever age you want to retire. this way you can effectively cover (most) of the risk of getting so sick that you will not be able to work. death and tpd usually only cover accidents and not sickness so CI has a use there.

i hope i did make sense - this is at least why i think CI makes sense. for my daughter i would probably want a cover of rm 2,000,000 - how high ould the premium be for that chew_ronnie? she is currently 17 months. i will compare this internationally - there are insurance companies that cover the risk of not beeing able to work anymore (and nothing else) even if you are not residing in their country (look for german, uk and irish insurances targeted at expats) and the cover is cheap. i believe for my kid and rm 1,000,000 my quote was a mere 60 EUR annual premium.

feel free to discuss this further

chew_ronnie,

certain CI in europe are indeed very very cheap. i guess this also has to do with a different risk assesment.

the allianz offer is very costly for just a CI insurance. nothing attached to the policy?

premium alone would total up to 236k roughly until 65 - or is the premium degrading over time? if you invest this much you end up at 750k or even more dont you?

chew_ronnie,

i know i know... the policy premium is quoted you is only CI (but i think it covers a wider range of sickness my list has 75 listings) and no death, TPD and its not ILP. this most likely explains the entire difference in premium.

death alone for RM 1M would probably be another 60-100 EUR annually, TPD is the costly part i presume but this is not available with the insurance we use. they have this "unable to work policy" instead which is not a lump sum but pretty similar in premium to what you quoted just now so the secret is reveiled. splitting the insurances can get specific covers you want at very low prices

and yes, we'll go ahead and take the policy from the german insurer. they are surprisingly unworried about the fact that they insure a malaysian citizen. they say they cover worldwide no matter what. just reserve the right to check with a german doc if they doubt the diagnosis which seems reasonable.

Hi my friend,

For your 3 mth old kid - it actually depends on what kind of protection you want and the budget you are able to afford and also the features. It actually doesnt matter what type of policy u get.

For hospitalisation - its best to linked it with an investment linked policy because of the lower Cost of Insurance so basically meaning that its premiums are quite cheap. Also do get at least a RM300 room and board for a child plan i.e. normally children are very prone to infection desease of the ear nose eye and throat so normally the child will be normally put in a single room (to seperate the illness to spread to other kids) and a single room in the hosp now is around Rm250 to RM270/nite.

If you would like to save some edu funds for your child - then get another separate endownment plan or the more popular 8 to 12 years saving plans from various companies. By doing this you will not mix up everything together - protection is protection and savings is savings.

For your case, would like to know how serious is your diabetic and ur hypertension level. Diabetic is a more serious issue here. So do let me know what is ur condition. I'm attached to Allianz and I have several cases of hypertension and all are accepted with loading.

You are free to pm me if you have queries. Thanks,
Ronnie

hi,

may i suggest you seperate the insurances? if you want medical cover, buy medical cover only. this will be a lot cheaper. for a very high cover, i believe AXA offers the highest limit (500k annually, no life-time limit). your kid will most likely be limited in choice by the plan you already have.

if you save yourself instead of getting the eduplan (buy bonds/investment fonds) then you save the policy overhead and the fat agent comission. why throw money out of the window? just buying the insurance will again minimize comission to the agent and thus maximise your money

investment-link insurances are a waste of money in my opinion. they sell uncessary insurances and waste by means of comissions. also you should always find an agent to split comission with or go direct. the savings are huge.

hi gary,

for your annual budget you can get your son a very good plan. i personally have chosen the axa smartcare plan with 500 k annual limit (costs around 700 RM for my 17 mth old daughter annually) and topped it up with tokio marine medic partner (10k deductable) to adjust the low cover for outpatient dialysis and cancer treatment from axa (they only pay lifetime 60k each, so 10k deductable for either kidney is more than enough and allows for 6 cancers before you have to pay a sen). tokio marine covers 150k max annually and 750k lifetime which is anough as an extra safety net if you ask me. premium is like 160 bucks or so.

so the combination will set you up nicely.

critical illness wont be needed from medical cost point of view then. if you want to protect death and TPD you might want to include him in your family plan if possible (for us this wasnt possible, we use MCIS 1M cover which does not take kids under 21).

the 3k savings is a good thing we forgot to buy it last year but will surely do it this december. instant savings you can even use the taxes saved to buy/pay for some of the insurances. so it's win-win!

if you go for foreign insurance policies you need to approach them. many will refuse some wont. usually some insurance companies in UK / Ireland / Germany (we have or had from all three countries) have offers made for expats but those are often open to others too. for example allianz worldwidecare in ireland offers a really sweet medical insurance with optional outpatient cover. take a look at their website - the premiums are too high for me even for the asian plans. healthcare is not that costly here and they seems to cater more for hong kong ppl but its an option. we used to be with them for around 3 years and they paid all bills promptly on time and even the delivery of my wife was paid for entirely. nice!

hi gary,

for your annual budget you can get your son a very good plan. i personally have chosen the axa smartcare plan with 500 k annual limit (costs around 700 RM for my 17 mth old daughter annually) and topped it up with tokio marine medic partner (10k deductable) to adjust the low cover for outpatient dialysis and cancer treatment from axa (they only pay lifetime 60k each, so 10k deductable for either kidney is more than enough and allows for 6 cancers before you have to pay a sen). tokio marine covers 150k max annually and 750k lifetime which is anough as an extra safety net if you ask me. premium is like 160 bucks or so.

so the combination will set you up nicely.

critical illness wont be needed from medical cost point of view then. if you want to protect death and TPD you might want to include him in your family plan if possible (for us this wasnt possible, we use MCIS 1M cover which does not take kids under 21).

the 3k savings is a good thing we forgot to buy it last year but will surely do it this december. instant savings you can even use the taxes saved to buy/pay for some of the insurances. so it's win-win!

if you go for foreign insurance policies you need to approach them. many will refuse some wont. usually some insurance companies in UK / Ireland / Germany (we have or had from all three countries) have offers made for expats but those are often open to others too. for example allianz worldwidecare in ireland offers a really sweet medical insurance with optional outpatient cover. take a look at their website - the premiums are too high for me even for the asian plans. healthcare is not that costly here and they seems to cater more for hong kong ppl but its an option. we used to be with them for around 3 years and they paid all bills promptly on time and even the delivery of my wife was paid for entirely. nice!

hi numbertwo,

yes tokio marine has a guaranteed renewal after one claims free year ("Renewal guaranteed after 12 months of 'claims-free' period."). since it's only meant as a top up plan this should not be an issue.

i also looked into medi-major but found the premium way to high to serve as a top-up cover. this would probably be more suitable for someone who uses it as a standalone policy and then pays the initial costs him/herself.

for us the tokio marine sounded good for the outpatient cancer / dialysis benefits. so you can first claim from the basic insurance and then from tokio marine anything exceeding 10k, thus keeping some buffer on the basic insurance. the high life-time limit (if you only look at those two benefits) should be more than sufficient even if you are truely unlucky.

the only drawback is that the policy can only be renewed until 70. i truely hope Tokio Marine and Axa and all the others will soon offer their policies with a higher renewal age. there definitely is a lot of movements in the last two years and 100 seems to be become the new 80 so there is hope for the young(er) ones among us

Hi PJusa,
ya i made a call to TK to enquire the same.. Like you said, renewal is not guarantee if you have claims on the current policy year, they will impose exclusion, or add loadings depending on the illness..  This is one drawback (for me at least..).  But of course their +ve is the outpatient cancer is as charged..but not the dialysis.  So, yeah..good n bad.  Thank for sharing.

Hi all,

I m newbie here...but i find premium for TM medicPlus is extremely cheap compare to normal conventional insurance provider... does it sound fishy????

As for guarantee renewal issue, there is a guideline by MMA that all insurance provider shud quote "it is guarantee renewal provided the insurer continue to provide this plan in the market". Which mean any insurance provider (IP) are allowed to withdraw the plan provided they have informed their customer few months in advance. Normally IP will opt to withdraw the plan rather than absorbing the losses if the claim is too high or mismanage continuously.

A typical example  : i have a real case happen to my friend's mum who bought a medical card frm SIHAT MALAYSIA was not allowed to renew after she made a claim due to minor stroke hospitalisation.

On the other hand, another case where my friend's mum was allowed to renew her medical card with Great Eastern without any discruption after she made a claim due to Parkinson.

I was told to opt for Life insurance provider instead of General life Insurnce provider due guarantee renewal issue...as normally reputable Life Insurance Provider has better/larger pool for risk assesment.

cutepigy