Buying health insurance is must, but one should be clear about the selection of plans & types of policies. Individual & family floaters are two types of health insurance plans available in market. Family floater policy covers family mostly proposer (self), spouse, dependent children and dependent parents, under single sum insured, where the amount floats over all the covered members. Floater policies are highly efficient in terms of price premiums are lower in comparison to individual covers.
Floater policies don not all the relations whereas Individual policies provide coverage for various relationships. Products available in market in their individual plans provide coverage for relations like, grandparents, grandsons, in-laws, siblings etc. on individual Sum Insured basis. Premium is charged individually as per provided age slabs. Each member utilizes his respective Sum Insured amount in an event of claim.
For, the family members with higher age who have more chance of making claims during policy period should prefer individual health policies. There may be chance that such age group individual may exhaust the available Sum Insured & other members covered under same sum insured amount may remain deprived of coverage during the policy period. Hence individual health policies are recommended for high age group individual while Floater policies are recommended for younger families.
Under individual policies if there is no claim, the insured is provided with no claim bonus free of cost, whereas in floater policies even if one member claims, the other members are not eligible to get no claim bonus. Hence if you are keen to get such extended benefits, individual policy should be chosen.
One should also think of what should be the ideal Sum Insured for a Health Insurance policy along while selecting the plan. Sum insured need may would vary from family to family, based upon the no. of members covered (Self, spouse and children or Self, spouse, children and dependent parents), age of the family members covered, location of the residence etc., which generally decides the cost of healthcare treatments. The premium paying capacity of the family also needs to be considered. However, considering increasing healthcare cost and spike in medical inflation, a Sum Insured should be adequate to match the inflated medical cost.