Health And Life Insurance - What's It All About? What Can It Do For You?

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by: Danielle Server
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Word Count: 599
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 Time: 3:50 AM
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Like all forms of insurance, health and life insurance is based on your personal traits and position; namely your life style, occupation, age, gender, residence and medical history. Obviously health insurance focuses mainly on your medical history, as well as other things that affect your health, such as whether you smoke and your age. Life insurance focuses mainly on age, life style, medical history again and to a certain extent, your gender. Be careful when making your application, making a misstatement on your application for insurance to make it cheaper renders the application void and if proved to have been intentional could see you facing insurance fraud.

Health Insurance and differences from country to country

Health insurance is money set aside against the risk of injury or sickness that requires a visit to the doctor or hospital; in the United Kingdom most residents are on the NHS which is funded through taxes, only around 10% of the country uses private health care and this is often on top of using the NHS, so health insurance is less of an issue than for other countries.

Most European countries now have some form of government funded health service, similar to the NHS but have a higher percentage of private care as well; France currently has 85% of its population in some form of private health care, while Germany has 23%. It is worth noting however that the public health care for each separate country is never exactly the same and France's and Germany's varies slightly from each other's and the UK's.

In North America the health system is very different. As the United States has no form of public health - although President Obama is trying to bring in some degree of free health care - all health care is private, meaning every citizen needs some form of health or medical insurance. Canada on the other hand does have a publicly funded health system, as well as a popular private sector and thus has a mix of health systems.

Public versus Private Health Insurance

Both sectors have their good and bad points; public health care being cheap, but patients often find themselves in waiting lists for serious operations, the number of people waiting over 13 weeks has risen by 22,100 since January 2009 to 67,700 in January 2010, an increase of 48% in a year. The NHS has become such a political battlefield as well right now that cuts, reforms and new policies are a constant feature and can prove confusing to some people. Private health care however, is much quicker as well as some private hospitals specialising in specific areas. The bad point to private care however is, of course, the price which can often be very expensive depending on the reason for your visit.

Life Insurance

Life insurance, which is also known as Life Assurance, is a form of insurance wherein a certain amount of money is paid to the insurance company that the contract has been drawn up with by the insured person. Upon the policy holder's death or if this person begins suffering from a serious or terminal illness a lump sum is paid to the relatives of the policy holder. This is generally a way to help loved ones with funeral expenses and the like. Unlike some forms of insurance, such as car insurance, life insurance is not compulsory. It is also not available on the NHS apart from under the Pension Scheme. It is widely available privately however and is most often aimed at the elderly.

About the Author

If you are a person looking for life insurance then you will need to do your research. The best place to start looking for is a health insurance guide and then you can discover which set-up is most suitable for your needs.