How much health insurance do you actually need?

Build the number from a bill, not an income multiple

Ask two or three hospitals you would actually use what a private-room admission, a common surgery, and a week in intensive care can cost today. You are not predicting a disease. You are checking the scale of a bill in your city. Add the amount your family could pay from cash without touching retirement or education money. The gap is the risk the policy must carry. Run the same exercise for every person on the policy. A family floater is one shared pool, so two admissions in one year can use it. A ₹10 lakh floater is not ₹10 lakh for each member. If parents are included, compare their own policy against the price and shared limit of one large floater.

Decide what belongs in the base policy

The base policy should be large enough to handle an admission you may realistically face and to meet the deductible on a super top-up. A top-up with a ₹10 lakh deductible above a ₹5 lakh base leaves a ₹5 lakh gap unless you can pay it yourself. Employer cover can count while the job exists, but it is not a permanent base. Benefits can change at renewal and the cover can end when employment ends. If you use it under a personally owned super top-up, be ready to fund the full deductible after a job change until your personal base is active.

Check the clauses that can shrink the useful cover

The headline sum insured is not the amount every claim will pay. Read the Customer Information Sheet and policy wording for: A smaller policy without these cuts can be more useful than a larger number surrounded by caps. Compare the payable claim, not the banner.

• Room eligibility and any proportionate deduction linked to a higher room.
• Co-pay, which leaves a percentage of an admissible claim with you.
• Disease or procedure sub-limits.
• Waiting periods for existing and named conditions.
• Whether restoration can be used by the same person, for the same illness, and in the same policy year.