Hmm if no as charged medical insurance how? Actually how does it work? I understand the basic medishield life has surgical table limits. I see that it’s very low like few k only...
So if one has major ops like heart surgery... 25k surgical ops only as a ward b2 patient subsidized. How much they need to pay?
The reason I consider an "as charged" public hospital B1 ward plan to be a reasonable baseline is that it does what insurance is supposed to do: defend well against the
big problems, in this case gigantic hospital bills. The "Standard" Integrated Shield plan and MediShield Life have various caps and limits, or at least several more than an "as charged" plan has. Whether you actually run past those limits, and by how much, depends on your situation. Also, those various limits may or may not be increased quickly enough to account for medical inflation.
Swan02's example illustrates how important it is in Singapore's public medical system to get the biggest available subsidies, especially if you're a Singaporean citizen. In that example, the patient had to go to the public hospital A&E then straight into the ICU. The ICU doesn't actually have a "class," so that patient was "tagged" as B2 or C ward for billing purposes. And since the patient was referred from the A&E, the billing was fully subsidized. Even so, the total bill rolled up to $120K even after subsidies. But out of pocket costs, still MediSave payable, were just a few percent of that. The various sublimits weren't binding in that case, fortunately.
I think ppl overlooked disability Income because they focus on CI or ECI as replacement ???
Some people think that, but DII is *not* CI or ECI, or vice versa. They are very, very different.
One way I explain DII is this way. When you buy term life insurance, your surviving dependent gets a payout to account for the fact that you're no longer around (you're dead) and can no longer work, earn a living, and take care of your dependent's lifestyle needs. OK, fine, good idea -- that's essential. Now, what happens if exactly the same thing happens (you cannot work and earn a living), but instead of dying you don't die? Instead, you linger, even to an ordinary ripe old age. What then? Well, in Singapore, you're f**ked without DII. And you're f**ked with or without a dependent, because when you linger you have to take care of yourself at least.
That's the risk pattern that DII protects against. It's a BIG risk, utterly catastrophic. Especially in high cost of living Singapore.
OK, but what about CI or ECI in that role? Well, there are a couple problems. The first problem is that if a bus runs you over, neither CI nor ECI will pay anything. (PA might or might not.) DII is what's called an "all risks" sort of policy, meaning it almost always pays when the outcome occurs (cannot work and earn a living due to virtually any disability, not just the ~37 or whatever on a "named perils" list). (I have to put "almost" because if you voluntarily jump onto the MRT tracks in front of a moving train, that's probably not covered.) The second problem is that you could lose millions of dollars of future lifetime earned income. A $100K or $200K or even $500K CI/ECI payout doesn't help enough, even if it's all paid up front. (And of course it isn't free to get a 6 figure payout up front. You pay for that in your insurance premium.)
Ci or eci is one lump sum and no conditions on whether being employed or not when u fall sick... and the amount is fixed. If u recover quickly then good, which the disability will give u much lesser money...
DII pays less money per month, true. A CI/ECI payout, if it happens, is a one-time lump sum. But if necessary DII pays every month after the waiting period for the entire policy term. That's decades and millions, if necessary and depending on when payouts start, your coverage level, your earnings prior to disability, and the remaining term. Ever priced CI/ECI that pays the net present value of a DII payout stream like that? And then you'd better hope the CI/ECI actually pay out if you're disabled, which it won't if you get injured by a runaway BMW.
Now,
maybe you could make an argument that a little CI is important enough to buy. Maybe. But I don't think you can make the argument that DII is not important enough to buy. Unless you can self-insure against the class of risks DII protects against, but then in that case neither CI or ECI would make sense.
My friend got a heart surgery and claimed CI. If he were to just buy disability, he wouldn’t be able to claim almost half a million and can only claim a few months of his current salary....
That's correct, and lucky for him it was his heart in that way, one of the items on the CI list. If it was some other body part not on the "named perils" list, or the same body part in a different way, no payout. Then he went back to work ("few months").
Here's an interesting question: what'd he do with the surplus ~$497K that wasn't spent on his medical care? Did he
need it? He paid for it, statistically speaking (plus overheads), in his insurance premiums.
Who wouldn't like a ~$497K windfall, right? But you should NOT buy insurance for windfalls you don't actually need. That's just buying lottery tickets, and frankly there are better lottery tickets available. To get the most value out of insurance you should be buying policies that provide payouts that you (and/or your dependents) actually, genuinely need, when you/they need it, for as long as you genuinely need it. That's the ideal, at least. (Insurance products aren't always ideal, but we do the best we can.) Most of us, especially early and mid career, need the incomes from work that we're earning, at least major portions of that income. So if we lose that income, we genuinely need to plug that gap. That's why we buy life insurance (if we have a dependent), and that's why we buy DII.
