Family floater or individual cover: Which one to buy?

If you are buying health insurance for yourself and your family, you have a choice of buying individual insurance policies that cover each member of the family separately or you can buy a single health insurancepplan that covers all the members of your family. But how does one decide which one to buy? Let’s find out.

If you are single and do not have any dependents to look after, then the obvious choice for you would be an individual insurance plan. An individual insurance plan is best when you need to buy insurance cover for yourself. But if you are married and you are living with your spouse, children and parents, then a family health insurance plan, also called the family floater plan, would be suitable for you.

There are many advantages of buying a family floater policy. It provides health insurance cover to husband, wife, dependent children and parents. It takes care of the expenses if any member of the family needs medical treatment and hospitalisation during the tenure of the policy. Since all the members of the family are covered under a single plan, the policy works out cheaper than buying individual health policies for each member of the family. Also, if the treatment of one member of the family does not fully utilise the entire amount of the policy, the balance amount can be utilised for the treatment of any other family member during the policy year. Hence, if a floater plan offers total insurance cover of Rs 10 lakh for all members of the family and if the cost of treatment and hospitalisation of one member is Rs 4 lakh, the balance amount of Rs 6 lakh can be utilised for the treatment of other member(s) of the family during the policy year.

However, the premium of a family floater plan is based on the age of the oldest member in the family. Therefore, if your parents are senior citizens, it would be better to buy a senior citizen policy separately, rather than including them in the family floater plan. This would help you to save on premium of the floater plan.