Indemnity means you get reimbursed for specific situations. Usually, medical indemnity, like hospital indemnity, pays you a set amount if you go to the hospital. For example, it might reimburse you $1,500 for admission and $100 per day.
Check the summary of benefits to see what the indemnity covers. Remember, indemnity is NOT health insurance. It pays a flat amount for certain situations and won’t cover costs not listed. With insurance, it often covers out-of-pocket hospital costs fully.
I checked the plan, and it does offer good payouts. However, without insurance, many costs will exceed the payouts.
The main issue is that the plan doesn’t have a maximum out-of-pocket limit. So, if something major happens, like a car accident requiring expensive surgery, it might only cover about half of the costs, leaving you with a large bill.
You could combine the indemnity with “catastrophe insurance” or a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), but I wouldn’t recommend relying on just an indemnity plan.
I wouldn’t get the HPG plan as a stand-alone option.
I had the lowest level of that policy along with the employer insurance we had at the time. The HPG paid out for my appendectomy, which was helpful since I was young and the premium was only about $40 a month. They paid around $2,000, but without the employer insurance, I would have been stuck with the remaining $30,000 bill.
If the premium is reasonable, you can consider getting it along with a traditional health plan. I dropped my policy when the premiums went over $100 a month because it no longer made financial sense for me. I wouldn’t enroll in one of those plans as a stand-alone. While an HPG might be better than nothing, your wife’s job change will give her a qualifying event to enroll in actual health insurance.
These will cover at most 5 to 25 percent of your costs, even at the highest tiers. They are not a replacement for health insurance but can help with copays and cost sharing from insurance plans.
From my experience in an ER billing office, these types of plans either don’t pay anything or pay so little that you’d get a better deal by going uninsured and getting a self-pay discount. Based on what I’ve seen, I think they’re a waste of money.