Family health has become an important issue, not only to the individual family holder, but also to employers and caretakers.  Employers in both public and private sectors are facing the irresistible fact that family health impacts greatly on the performance of their employees.  They are meant to understand that you can not have a healthy employee unless such an employee has a healthy family.  As such, family health insurance has become part and parcel of the employment package.  This has given rise and even greater need for family health insurance.

Individual family holders are also not spared by this reality.   They are continuously facing the fact that their personal health is a function of the health of the entire family.  No reasonable mother or father will claim having excellent health when any of her or his children is sick, and or any other direct dependants have health problems.  They are therefore increasingly getting family health insurance ahead of individual health insurance coverage.

What does family health insurance cover?

Family health insurance often covers all the health insurance needs or risks of both the individual and his or her immediate family.  It usually covers the health risks of the individual seeking insurance, his or her spouse and children, plus any other immediate (direct) dependants.  This means when it is provided by the employer, it covers the employee and his or her immediate family.

On the request of the client, a health insurance provider may customize family health insurance to meet the needs of the individual client.  It may for example be customized to cover only common illnesses like colds, fever, rash and the like.  Alternatively, it may only cover long term (chronic) illnesses like cancer, Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and the like. 
It may also be customized to cover only dependants, who are below a certain age limit, say sixteen years.  Under normal circumstances however, family health insurance usually covers both long term and short term health risks and needs of the entire family.

Why family health insurance?

One may need to know why we should go out of the way and seek family health insurance instead of covering the health insurance needs of individuals.  To understand the reason for this, we ought to consider the benefits of acquiring family health insurance than individual health insurance.  These are;

Family health insurance is the most and only perfect assurance that your health is under the right protection.  It makes little meaning to only insure individual health when the rest of the family members remain uninsured.  To be confident that your health is under the right protection, your family’s health must be equally covered, hence the need for family health insurance.   Ill-health for just one family member can be stressful and may in effect create a syndrome of ill health or disease.  So it is only one has family health insurance that he or she is sure he/she is perfectly insured.

It is also important to note that acquiring family health insurance at once is cheaper that getting health insurance for each family member.  The unit cost of health insurance reduces considerably when family health insurance is acquired instead of insuring against the health risks of each individual independently. It thus pays great dividends to enroll for family health insurance.

More so, family health insurance is easier to administer and service.  For organizations providing insurance for their employees, it would be a great inconvenience to service the insurance needs of each employee and their dependants independently.  Even for individual family heads paying their own insurance bills, it is more of a hassle to pay off the health insurance bills of each family member independently.  But with family health insurance, such bills are paid off as a single batch.  This without doubt, reduces the administrative costs associated with health insurance and this is welcome for everyone.

So have you acquired family health insurance?