Critical illness cover, also known as dread disease cover, helps pay for additional medical expenses and lifestyle adjustments.

Surviving a critical illness isn’t easy, but with the right cover, you can focus on recovery – instead of the medical bills. Critical illness cover offers financial protection against illnesses such as heart attack, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It also covers injuries from accidents such as paraplegia, major burns, and brain damage.

This cover pays out a lump sum amount that you can use to pay for additional medical expenses and lifestyle adjustments.

Consider how you’ll manage the additional expenses not covered by your medical aid. With advancements in medical treatment, many individuals now survive illnesses once deemed fatal. However, even as people return to relatively normal lives after a critical illness, financial support may still be necessary for lifestyle adjustments and other costs that medical aid doesn’t cover.

While medical aid schemes typically offer adequate in-hospital coverage, challenges often arise with out-of-hospital expenses, chronic medications, and experimental treatments, which are usually excluded. Serious conditions like heart disease, stroke, and cancer can impose significant financial strain, even for those with comprehensive medical aid plans.

This is where critical illness cover comes into play. It provides the financial support needed to cover these extra costs, allowing you to focus on your recovery without the added worry of financial burdens.

Because the financial impact of a critical illness will vary from person to person, there is no scientific way to determine the benefit amount of a critical illness benefit. You should get the most cover you can afford

By Partnering with Momentum Myriad you can add additional Unique benefits to your critical illness cover.

• By adding Momentum’s Longevity Protector™ – critical illness benefit to your critical illness cover you can ensure that your cover will never run out, no matter how long you live with a critical illness. If you have a qualifying claim, in addition to the normal lump sum payment under your critical illness benefit, this benefit pays 10% of the critical illness benefit amount every five years for moderate to severe claim events. If you never claim, it will pay you 20% of the critical illness benefit at age 80, through the unique Longevity Enhancer. 
• Momentum’s Specified Claim Event Enhancer enhances the tiered payouts of the 25%, 50% and 75% severities for the four most common critical illnesses, namely cancer, stroke, heart attack and coronary artery bypass grafts, up to 100% payout.
• Momentum’s Breadth of Cover Guarantee™ is a benefit unique to Momentum, it ensures that you will receive a pay-out for all defined critical illness events covered by them and any other life insurance company.  

While medical insurance covers the cost of treatment, Critical Illness Insurance provides a lump-sum payment directly to you upon diagnosis of a covered illness. You can use the funds for any purpose, such as paying for out-of-pocket medical costs, household expenses, or making necessary lifestyle adjustments.

The Standard Critical Illness Definitions Project (SCIDEP) has established industry-standard definitions and contract wording for critical illnesses, categorised into four tiers. These standard definitions apply to the following major illnesses:

• Cancer
• Myocardial infarction (heart attack)
• Coronary artery bypass surgery (heart bypass)
• Stroke

Our Critical Illness Insurance policy fully complies with these SCIDEP standards. In addition to this, we offer a 100% payout of the insured amount for critical illness, regardless of the severity of the condition, ensuring you receive the financial support you need when facing a serious health crisis.

Comprehensive Critical Illness Benefits with Breadth of Cover Guarantee®
Our critical illness benefits cover approximately 270 defined conditions – but numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. With our Breadth of Cover Guarantee®, your policy will automatically include any new claimable events introduced by competitors. This ensures you always have the most up-to-date and comprehensive cover available.

No need to worry about keeping track of market changes – we do that for you. The moment new events become claimable elsewhere, your policy updates seamlessly, giving you peace of mind knowing you’re always fully protected.

No other competitor can match this level of assurance.

The Catch-All category provides a payout when an insured individual experiences a “whole body” impairment without qualifying for a payout under a specific body system category. This situation typically arises when an illness, such as diabetes, affects multiple body systems. Notably, the insured must have a Whole-Person Impairment (WPI) of more than 35% to qualify for a payment from the Complete Critical Illness range. The Catch-All claims category offers a 100% payout.

The Breadth of Cover Guarantee® is unique to Myriad and allows an insured life to receive a payout for less serious qualifying claim events that may be covered by competitors but are not explicitly defined in our critical illness benefits. The payout will be the lesser of the percentage payout under the competitors’ qualifying critical illness benefit or 20%.

A survival period specifies how long an insured individual must survive after an event before a claim can be approved.

Myriad does not impose a survival period, while some other companies do. This period is commonly used to differentiate between a critical illness event and a death benefit. Critical illness benefits were designed to assist individuals in managing the additional financial responsibilities that arise during or following a critical illness. If a person passes away shortly after a critical illness claim event, the associated treatment costs are often not yet incurred or may still be minimal.

In contrast, a death benefit is intended to provide income replacement or to settle significant debts of the insured individual upon their death. These two types of benefits address different needs, and a survival period serves as an effective mechanism to distinguish between these purposes.