How to protect your baby’s health financially both before and after birth
If you’re already a parent in Singapore, you know how hectic things can be in the build up to the birth of your new addition. If you are only now planning on starting a family, it wouldn’t surprise us if you are kind of freaked out due to all of the thoughts racing through your mind. There are so many preparations to make, and then a whole host of worries about being a good parent after the arrival of your new bundle of joy. Whether your next child is your first or your tenth, the last thing you want to have to worry about is money or how you are going to pay for pregnancy, labor, and delivery. With this in mind, Pacific Prime Singapore has produced the below article all about addressing costs with baby insurance. Read on to find out more.
Pre-natal care and best maternity insurance in Singapore
How do you intend on covering the costs of pregnancy, labor, and delivery? If you are a local Singaporean, you likely will depend on your Medisave account, or that of an immediate family member, as well as the public healthcare system, to cover the majority of pregnancy testing and birthing costs. However, if you fall into this camp, you should be aware that there are caps placed on how much money from a Medisave account can be withdrawn for various maternity procedures. For example, the maximum withdrawal limit on a standard delivery is SGD 3,000, while the cap on a Caesarian delivery is SGD 4,850. These figures include the sum of limits on pre-delivery expenses, daily hospitalization, and the delivery itself. Keeping in mind that delivery in a private Singapore hospital can cost over SGD 11,000, those depending on Medisave will likely want to utilize a public hospital.
For expats living in Singapore without Permanent Resident status, Medisave accounts and public medical facilities will not be maternity options available to you. This means that you will have to have to use the country’s private hospitals for pre-natal check sand birthing, and the costs will have to either be covered by private maternity insurance or out of pocket.
Other things to know about pre-natal care, delivery, and baby insurance
- Those needing to obtain the best maternity insurance to cover maternity costs need to be aware that maternity insurance plans come with lengthy waiting periods before they can be claimed upon. This length of time can be 1 year, 2 years, or even longer. This means that if you do not already have maternity insurance in place when you conceive a child, it will be too late to have any benefits in place for pre-natal checks or delivery. Therefore, be sure to obtain coverage a couple years before you think you may want to have kids.
- Those having trouble conceiving can also use Medisave funds for up to three rounds of assisted conception procedures.
- Complications during labor and delivery can be exponentially more expensive than a standard delivery, to the point that the costs can lead to burdensome medical debt. While having a Medisave account in place to differ some of these costs helps, a private maternity insurance plan is really the best way to cover skyrocketing costs that can result from complications.
- If your employer provides you and/or your family with group medical insurance, it is possible that it includes maternity insurance coverage. Of course, businesses oftentimes leave out maternity benefits to keep their costs low. It’s important to familiarize yourself with your policy documentation to ensure whether you have maternity coverage or not.
Newborn baby insurance in Singapore
Again, if you are a Singaporean citizen with a Medisave account, you can use the funds in the account to cover medical costs for your child after it is born. It should also be noted that the government provides grants for newborn children to help cover a baby’s medical costs. A SGD 4,000 grant can be used to pay for MediShield Life premiums, and the costs of hospitalization, vaccination, or other approved outpatient treatments.
Again, those without access to publicly subsidized healthcare or Medisave in Singapore will have to depend on private health insurance to address the ongoing costs of healthcare for their child. While maternity insurance will cover complications from delivery up to a few months after a baby is born, beyond this a newborn baby insurance plan will need to be obtained to ensure continuous coverage. This type of plan can be arranged even prior to a baby’s delivery, and functions very much the same as a health insurance plan for an adult.
Other things to know about neo-natal care and newborn baby insurance
- Parents will no doubt want to make sure that any plans they ensure cover vaccinations, as well as comprehensive out-patient coverage, as babies do tend to become ill often.
- If you already have multiple children, you may be able to add a new child to your family health insurance plan at no additional cost. Some health insurance plans will only charge additional premiums for the first two children on a family plan, so adding a third child or beyond will be free.
Need assistance?
It’s understandable if you have questions about any of the above information. After all, medical care of any kind can be complicated in a city that has both a public and private healthcare system, with multiple social programs in place to subsidize costs; especially if you may have access to some of these programs, but not others. Fortunately, the experienced Singapore insurance experts at Pacific Prime Singapore are on hand to help.
For answers to all of your questions, feel free to contact us. We’ll take the time to lay out the information in an easily understandable way. And if you decide that baby insurance is something that you should have, our staff can provide you with a comparison of available plans on the market, as well as a free price quote. Talk to us today!
With over 5 years of experience in the field, Suphanida spends the majority of her day synthesizing complex pieces of insurance-related information and translating this into easy-to-understand, engaging, and effective content across a variety of media such as articles, infographics, whitepapers, videos, and more.
Suphanida is also responsible for planning and publishing three whitepapers released annually by Pacific Prime: The State of Health Insurance Report, The Cost of Health Insurance Report, and The Global Employee Benefits Trends Report. Additionally, she handles the LinkedIn profiles of Pacific Prime’s Founder and CEO, as well as Global HR Lead.
Suphanida’s strengths lie in her strong research and analytical skills, which she has gained from her BA in Politics from the University of Warwick and Erasmus Mundus Joint MA in Journalism from Aarhus University and City, University of London.
Being of Thai-Indian origin and having lived, studied, and worked in Thailand, the UK, and Denmark, Suphanida also has a unique, multicultural perspective that helps her understand the struggles of expats and globetrotters.
Outside of work, she enjoys traveling to new places and immersing herself in different cultures.
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