Critical illness insurance can be a lifesaver for people who wouldn't be able to pay their bills if they got sick with something like cancer, a heart attack, or a stroke. If something like this happened, you would soon have a lot of bills to pay, like your mortgage, your medical bills, taking care of your family, and planning for the future.
Critical illness insurance gives you a lump sum payment that is not taxed and can be used however you want. Some people use the money to pay off their mortgage, while others use it to pay for private medical care or put it in the bank so they can continue to pay their regular bills and make any changes to their home that might be needed because of their illness.
The illnesses this policy covers and how much you pay for it vary from company to company. There are many different kinds of policies, and the level of coverage will affect both how much you pay for insurance and what is covered. But the policy can be changed in some ways, and some companies offer benefits based on how much you can pay.
It's very important to fully understand important insurance policies, because every type of insurance has many things that aren't covered. Policies will only pay out for the conditions listed in them, which usually include heart attack, stroke, major organ transplant, cancer, coronary heart bypass, and multiple sclerosis.
However even with these being outlined within the policy it still doesn't mean that it is cut and dry, for example with some insurers you have to have proof that your heart problems are not such as angina, as this is excluded from some policies. So make sure you always read the fine print to find out what the policy covers and what it doesn't.
Before you can make a claim on a policy, you usually have to wait a certain amount of time. You can usually get a critical insurance policy between the ages of 17 and 70.