Finance

What are the Tax Benefits on Preventive Health Check-Ups?

Our daily lifestyles include many unhealthy lifestyle habits, and continuing these routines for a long tenure can lead to major health issues. This is why it is important to practice a healthy diet and take the proper precautions for protecting ourselves.

Among the different ways to ensure you are protected against health issues, opting for a health insurance plan is the most preferred method. While several individuals choose health insurance for tax benefits, it is important to purchase a suitable plan for protecting yourself from financial stress due to medical expenses.

Most insurers like Tata AIG have launched their official websites to help customers. This way, you can compare health insurance plans online by looking through the different options. Comparing the different medical health insurance policies will help you decide the coverage you are liable to get.

Getting a health insurance plan can easily help you deal with different medical ailments. However, wouldn’t it be better if you could stay one step ahead of an ailment? While it may seem impossible, opting for a preventive health check-up at regular intervals can help you do so!

What is Preventive Health Check-Up?

Your well-being is defined by your physical, mental, and social well-being, which you can achieve through a balanced diet, exercise, and getting the required amount of sleep. But certain ailments and diseases grow over time. If they aren’t caught in time, they can lead to serious medical issues in the long term.

Dealing with medical issues can be quite draining. It can take a toll on your physical and mental well-being. Along with this, it will also impact your loved ones. To ensure you are one step ahead of an ailment or a disease, you must opt for a preventive health check-up to ensure you are one step ahead of an ailment or a disease.

Preventive health check-ups are designed to catch and lower the impact of an ailment. Catching the disease at an early stage will protect you from the financial burden of medical bills in the long term, and it will help you stay healthy for a long time.

Therefore, opting for preventive health check-ups can be quite helpful in the long run. Apart from the benefits of protecting yourself in the long run, opting for preventive health check-ups also comes with certain tax benefits.

What are Tax Benefits on Preventive Health Check-Ups?

With preventive health check-ups, you get to enjoy a tax exemption of ₹5000 as per Section 80D of the Income Tax Act. For instance, if an individual has made a payment of ₹20,000 as the premium for the medical insurance and then opted for a health check-up that costs around ₹5000, then the total amount of ₹25,000 will be eligible for tax exemption under Section 80D of the Income Tax Act.

Things to Remember About Tax Benefit on Preventive Health Check-Ups

Here are certain things you must remember about the health check-up deduction in income tax:

  1. The premium limit for check-ups: In the overall limit in deduction for the premium aid towards a health insurance policy, a limit of ₹5000 is allowed for preventive health checkups. This means the amount that one can spend in a single financial year on prevenbtive health check-ups is ₹5000. There is no additional deduction for senior citizens who opt for preventive health check-ups. This tax deduction is included in the overall limit of ₹25,000 for people below 60 years and ₹50,000 for people over 60 years of age stated under the Section 80D of the Income Tax Act, 1961.
  2. Expenditure for deduction: To get the proper tax benefits on the preventive health check-up, you will have to carry out expenditure of a certain amount in the specified financial year. You can carry out preventive health check-ups for yourself, your spouse, children, or dependent parents. There is no specified limit set for the number of children covered under the health check-up in a family.
  3. Cash payments: Even if you make the payments in cash, you will get the tax benefits for the preventive health check-ups as per Section 80D.
  4. Exclusions for tax benefits: The tax benefits for preventive health check-ups come with certain limitations. For example, your in-laws, financially independent children, siblings or distant relatives are not considered for availing this tax benefit.

Apart from the tax benefits for preventive health check-ups, you are also liable to get a few tax benefits on the health insurance plan you own.

Tax Benefits of Health Insurance

Given below are some tax benefits of health insurance plans:

  1. If you’ve bought the health policy for yourself and your family where all members are under the age of 60, the deduction amount under Section 80D is ₹25,000.
  2. If you’ve bought the health policy for yourself and your family and another health insurance policy for your parents (all members below 60 years), the deduction amount is ₹50,000 (₹25,000 + ₹25,000).
  3. If you’ve bought the health policy for yourselfa and your senior citizen parents, the deduction amount under Section 80D is ₹75,000 (₹25,000 + ₹50,000).
  4. If you’ve bought the policy for yourself and your family (where the eldest individual is above 60 years) and your senior citizen parents, the deduction amount is ₹1,00,000 (₹50,000 + ₹50,000).

Conclusion

Preventive health check-ups are routine check-ups that include a series of diagnostic tests. These tests will help you detect health issues before they become serious ailments in the future. Therefore, opting for preventive health check-ups can be quite beneficial. Along with this, they also offer tax benefits. However, the tax benefits for health check-ups come with certain limitations. Therefore, it would be better to learn about the benefits before availing them.

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