Including of this site. These are the questions that separate a policy which fits your household from one that simply sold well — and the answers you get will tell you as much about the adviser as about the product.
Most people buying insurance in India are handed a comparison table and asked to pick. The table shows premium, sum insured, and a column of green ticks. Almost everything that decides whether the policy works sits outside that table.
These twelve questions pull it back in. Ask them of a website's chat window, a bank relationship manager, a relative who sells policies, or of him. Good answers are specific and include at least one drawback. Vague answers are their own answer.
Any plan worth buying survives being questioned. The rest need you not to ask.
Some of this is not in any brochure, and it is the part that only comes from working the same catchment for a long time.
Private room tariffs at well-known hospitals in East Delhi, Noida and Ghaziabad have moved faster than the 1%-of-sum-insured convention that many older policies still carry. A cap that was generous when the policy was written is now a constraint on the whole bill.
Families in Vivek Vihar, Shahdara, Indirapuram or Vaishali usually have three or four realistic hospitals nearby, and they are not in-network for every insurer. Choosing an insurer whose network matches your actual geography quietly removes most claim friction.
Adding elderly parents to a family floater raises the premium for everyone and exposes the shared sum insured to their claims. A separate senior citizen policy, bought before conditions accumulate, is almost always the better structure — and the window for it closes quietly.
Traders and professionals across East Delhi carry two risks at once: the medical bill and the income that stops while they are away from the business. That is the case where hospital cash and critical illness stop being decorative.
Group cover ends with the job, and serious illness has a habit of arriving alongside a career disruption. A modest personal policy running underneath employer cover keeps waiting periods ticking down while you are healthy and employed.
Policy wording, proposal copy, premium receipts, medical reports, and a page at the front with renewal dates and the claim helpline. Sounds trivial. It is the difference between a two-week claim and a two-month one.
If you are starting from nothing, this sequence has held up across a lot of households:
Nobody does all six at once, and nobody needs to. Doing the first three properly puts you ahead of most households.
Room rent, sub-limits, waiting periods, network. Work through it before you sign.
Read →A cover figure built from dependents, liabilities and goals — not from a comfortable premium.
Read →Twenty-six years, the same catchment, and a phone that is meant to be answered.
Read →If any of the twelve did not get a straight answer elsewhere, that is a useful finding. Bring them here.