How does Sanlam Indie’s Critical Illness Cover work?

At Sanlam Indie, we try to design all our products to meet real needs and add genuine value to our customers’ lives without unnecessary bells and whistles. Critical Illness cover (where the insurer pays a lump sum if the client gets one of a list of predefined illnesses) is a tricky one, because people take out these policies for different reasons.

How our product works

You won’t want to deal with red tape when you’re seriously ill. It can be a lot to handle, and expensive:

• There’ll probably be extra medical expenses that your medical aid scheme won’t cover (e.g. frail care, or certain treatments)

• There’ll be changes to your lifestyle that require cold hard cash to deal with

• You might not be able to work for a while, or at all, while you undergo treatment

• You might just want to tick off some bucket-list items before you go.

So our Critical Illness Cover works like this: if you get a disease on this list, you get a lump sum payout (which can be quite a lot). Whether you use the money for medical bills, household expenses, or that round-the-world cruise you always wanted makes no difference to us.

What's covered by Sanlam Indie's Critical Illness cover?

Short answer: most conditions.

We realise that when you compare our list of conditions against competing products, our list is waaaay shorter. We designed it this way deliberately, because:

• A shorter list is easier to understand. We don’t want you to get any surprises down the line about what you are/aren’t covered for.

• Our list covers the conditions you’ll most likely claim for. Most claims across the industry are for cancer, heart attacks, stroke and coronary artery bypass. We’re just listing the most obvious stuff so it doesn’t get lost in the noise.

• Our “catch-all” definitions are meant to cover most other serious things. We pay out if you’re in the ICU, for whatever reason, for 7 consecutive days or more – or if you’re permanently unable to care for yourself. So if you do get a weird, rare condition that puts you in hospital or disables you, you’re still covered. Simple.

Does the severity of the critical illness affect how much is paid out?

Some insurers will adjust their payouts to match the severity of the illness. For example, they might pay out 25% of your cover for stage 1 cancer, and 100% for stage 4. 

Actually, your expenses are likely to be high from your first diagnosis. In some cases, if you’re diagnosed early enough, the cancer might be fully curable with the correct (probably expensive) treatment, but discovering late-stage cancer might be too far advanced to make costly treatment worth it. 

So to keep things simple, we pay out 100% on almost all our benefits (and even more for certain types of cancer). For our ICU catch-all condition we pay 50%, and for risk management purposes we pay 15% cover on some early stages of cancer that can be removed cheaply, or diagnosis of certain cancers very soon after buying the policy.

At Sanlam Indie, we’d rather have a really simple, solid product than one which seems fancy and complex but doesn’t give you what you need when you need it most.