SBI Life insurance has launched Poorna Suraksha, a pure term plan with an in-built critical illness (CI) cover. The policy term chosen can be 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 years and the sum assured can vary from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 2.5 crore. Premium payment periods can be monthly, half-yearly and yearly. The premium will remain the same for the entire term of the policy.

We take a closer look at a couple of its salient features.

Life stage rebalancing: This feature means that as the age of the insured increases, critical illness cover increases and life cover decreases at every policy anniversary, thus keeping the total cover constant for the entire policy term. At the time of inception of the policy, the basic sum assured (SA) would be spread between life cover SA and CI SA in the ration of 80:20. For the first 10 years the CI SA will go up by 15 per cent every year as a percentage of the initial CI SA. From 10-15 years it will go up by 10 per cent, from 15-20 years by 7.5 per cent, from 20-25 years by 6 per cent and from 35-30 years by 5 per cent. As the CI SA increases, the life cover will go down in a corresponding manner.

Critical illness benefit: The CI benefit will cover 36 ailments like brain tumor, cancer, kidney failure and so on. The amount can be claimed independent of any other health insurance plan as a lump sum benefit irrespective of the actual bill amount. The CI benefit will be paid only once and it will cease once it is paid. The CI SA will be paid only if the insured survives a period of 14 days after the date of diagnosis. There is also a waiting period of 90 days between the date of commencement of the policy and diagnosis of the critical illness and if a claim is made within that period, no CI benefit is payable. The policy also comes with a premium waiver feature where the premium will be waived off from the date of diagnosis of the critical illness till the rest of the policy term on diagnosis of a covered critical illness.