What illnesses are considered critical?

When choosing a policy, you should consider the critical illnesses that are being covered. New conditions are regularly added, but only to new policies. Existing policies are never updated.

Each policy insures you for a wide list of illnesses and conditions.

A company’s ‘Key Features’ document will provide details of the main illnesses covered. If you ask ClickLife to post you an Application Pack, the "Key Features Document" will be included as part of that Pack.

The main conditions you will be familiar with are:

• Cancer
• Heart attack
• Stroke

As developments in medical knowledge take place, more conditions are included under these policies.

The following is a alphabetical list of critical illnesses which are typically included in a critical illness policy:

• Alzheimer's Disease
• Aorta Graft surgery
• Bacterial Meningitis
• Blindness
• Brain Tumour
• Cancer
• CJD
• Coma
• Coronary Artery by-pass surgery
• Coronary Artery Angioplasty
• Deafness
• Heart attack
• Heart Valve replacement/repair
• HIV/AIDS resulting from blood transfusion
• Inability to perform your duties of occupation
• Kidney failure
• Leukaemia
• Loss of limbs
• Loss of speech
• Major organ transplant (or waiting list)
• Motor Neuron diseases
• Multiple Sclerosis
• Occupational HIV/AIDS
• Paralysis
• Paraplegia
• Parkinson’s disease
• Stroke
• Third Degree burns
• Total and Permanent disability

Will your critical illness policy allow the use of alternative medicines?

There are no conditions applied to how you choose to spend a payout from a critical illness plan. A payment is made purely on a correct diagnosis.

However, there may be an issue before a claim is made. A typical exclusion on a critical illness policy is that of ‘Failure to follow medical advice’. The policy document may state that they will not pay out if a claim is caused directly or indirectly resulting from an unreasonable failure to either seek or follow medical advice.

You could interpret this as saying that, if your GP has told you to avoid the alternative medicines then, evidence will form part of a refusal.

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