Health insurance is designed to protect against loss of income and expenses for medical care. There are two broad categories of health insurance policies: disability income policies and medical expense policies.
Disability income policies can also be referred to as loss of income, loss of time or replacement income. This type of policy will pay benefits to an insured who is disabled and can no longer work to earn a regular income. Payments can be weekly or monthly depending on the policy.
Medical expense policies are represented by a wide range of coverage from very minimal to comprehensive packages with multiple coverage. Some include both accidents and illnesses, various hospital expenses and other costs pertaining to medical care such as accident and sickness policies, hospital-stay policies, basic medical expense policies and major medical expense policies.
Any of these policies might cover various combinations of the above and may be paid in a lump sum.Some policies cover only accidents and not illness. As you might imagine, policies like this are very specific about what is considered an accident.
It is important to understand what is...