Pru Protect – Serious Illness Insurance

PruProtect is a relatively new company to the market located in the UK. Although they are fairly new they do however have strong backing from two other companies, which are Prudential and Discovery. Discovery is a company which is based in South Africa and is a leader in their insurance industry, which therefore supports and gives guidance then to PruProtect. It was in 2007 that PruProtect announced that they were going into a joint venture with Discovery. As a company PruProtect have won various awards, an example of these would be the defaqto award where there were rated a five star contract for their serious illness cover since 2007 for both level and decreasing plans and also an award for their income protection cover. Others are the online finance award, health insurance award, and also for life protection by Money Marketing.

PruProtect as a company have a slightly different view in comparison to other companies in the market, therefore they offer a slightly different contract. PruProtect do offer cover such as life insurance, serious illness and income protection. The key element in that is the serious illness cover offered which is where PruProtect believe in paying out when it is most needed by the individual insured. The PruProtect plan is a menu based plan with core benefits namely life cover, serious illness cover, and income protection. However the plan will allow you to incorporate other features for example health cover, unemployment cover and education cover. Of key importance is the serious illness cover which broadly sits with critical illness cover however serious illness cover is a severity based protection.

This means that unlike traditional critical illness policies which pay out on the basis of your critical illness meeting a specific definition, serious illness cover will pay out on lesser illnesses. A critical illness contract would typically cover about thirty five to forty illnesses where PruProtect comprehensive plan would cover over a hundred and sixty; therefore you would be covered for serious illnesses and partial disabilities. If a claim was to be made on the serious illness contract, PruProtect pay out on a severity basis and how that illness would then affect your life. The idea behind paying out on a severity basis is that clients could receive a payout a certain amount on the earlier stage of a condition and it would not have to be life threatening, and if that early payout was made the full sum may not be paid on the severity basis then you plan would still remain in force for you then to be able to make another claim. Therefore if after a partial payout the illness suffered then got worse another payout could be made. PruProtect have a product which can be tailored, as you can add certain products to a life plan, for example adding unemployment cover, health cover, family income cover, disability cover, premium waiver or indexation and serious illness cover for your children.