A cashless health insurance policy comes with the facility of cashless treatment at network hospitals.

In case you take a treatment at any hospital, after verifying all your health insurance documents, your hospital coordinates with your health insurer directly or through a third party administrator to make a claim under your health insurance policy.

Your insurer pays the approved claim amount directly to the hospital. You thus avail the facility of cashless treatment at the hospital.

Cashless facility is only available if the insured goes to a network hospital for the treatment.

Network hospitals are a list of hospitals throughout the country which are tied up with an insurer to provide cashless treatment facilities to its customers.

If you have a health insurance policy and go to one of the network hospitals, you can avail cashless treatment facility. Cashless facility is not available outside network hospitals.

Every health or general insurer in India has a network of hospitals. One hospital could be tied up with one or multiple insurers at the same time.

Health insurers usually provide rewards to their customers at the time of renewal for staying healthy.

If you buy a health insurance policy and do not make any claim in any policy year, your health insurer will reward you in the form of increased coverage at no extra cost at renewal. This increased coverage is your no claim bonus.

The extent of no claim bonus and terms and conditions attached to it may vary from insurer to insurer.

Unless mentioned in the policy document specifically under the list of exclusions, deaths due to natural disasters are not excluded under term insurance.

Term insurance is the most affordable form of life insurance. You can buy a good amount of coverage at a very little cost.

Term insurance is cheap as it is a pure protection product which does not provide any form of maturity benefit.

There can be many ways to calculate required term cover. One of them is the expense replacement method. You have to consider all the monthly expenses of your dependants and project them into the future assuming inflation for the next 20 or 25 years. Then you discount all of them to get their present values and add them all. Add all your current outstanding loans to this and you get your required term cover.

But all this can get very complicated for a layman. So as a rule of thumb, you can go for 20 to 25 times of your current annual income as your term cover.

Smokers are proven to be more prone to various health conditions, including lung cancer, heart disease, and respiratory issues. They have higher mortality rates than non-smokers, leading to higher mortality risk for the insurer. Hence life insurers charge more premium to smokers than non-smokers.