A company plan is built to a budget, and that budget was not set with your family in mind. A serious illness in a private hospital here can run past the limit faster than most people expect.
The other half of it is that the cover belongs to the job rather than to you. It ends when the job does, and if something is diagnosed along the way it may be excluded or loaded when you come to buy your own. You are insurable today, and that is the part people miss.
A real case
An HR manager called us about one of the team. His son had arrived 9 weeks early and was in neonatal intensive care at a private hospital in Singapore. The unit was running at S$4,000 a day at least, and nobody could say how many days there would be. We were put straight on the phone with him. He wanted to know one thing, which was whether the insurer would stand behind it.
We had the newborn enrolled by the next working day. The administration landed about a week after he was born, but the insurer agreed to guarantee the bills from birth rather than from the date the paperwork caught up. The company scheme the family were on covers a newborn from birth up to S$207,000. The final bill came to S$260,000, so they still paid a share of it. The emergency caesarean was a separate bill, and that one was covered in full.
Nobody would call that a perfect outcome. It was a very different one from the alternative.
What the scheme reached, and what it did not
S$207,000
S$53,000
Final bill
S$260,000
Covered by the company scheme
S$207,000
The family paid
S$53,000
One real case, anonymised and permission-cleared. A newborn limit of S$207,000 is that scheme’s, not a market figure, and yours will differ. It is here to show that a ceiling is a real number with a real edge, not to predict where yours sits.
What a top-up costs
Because the company plan absorbs the first layer, a top-up sitting above it is usually priced on a high deductible, which keeps the added premium modest. We will size it once we can see what your existing scheme actually covers.
Three things to consider
The ceiling
What your company plan actually caps out at, which most people have never checked.
Portability
What happens to the cover if you change jobs, and whether your medical history goes with you when it ends.
Overlap
Making sure a top-up genuinely fills the gap rather than duplicating what you already have.
What we do
Read your scheme’s actual limits with you, rather than working from what the benefits summary implies.
Size a plan that sits above it instead of alongside it, so you are not paying twice for the first layer.
Tell you when the scheme is already enough. That answer costs us the sale and it is still the right one.
