Insurers aim high: Vow to cover 500 mln Indians in 5 years

Microfinance Focus, July 10, 2009: Indian health insurance industry aims to cover 500 million population over the next five years, said V. Vaidyanathan, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance managing director, at a FICCI-organised conference in New Delhi on Friday.
Dr Rudiger Krech of GTZ pointed out that economic development and health insurance go hand in hand. He stressed the need for a comprehensive package which would cater the risks associated with  unemployment, injury, old age among others. He reiterated the need to develop social infrastructure like proper sewerage, education, pure water and said health insurance  is intricately associated with all these efforts. Factually speaking,  moneylenders who charge more that 25% interest are responsible for putting people back in poverty, he noted.
In India, we have 3% population that plunges into poverty (BPL) each year because of high health costs, unavailability of insurance and huge loan burden for borrowing money for health care treatment. A big turnaround would be to rely upon self-help groups and social networks like MFI’s for distribution of health insurance, he said.
Dr Hari Narayan shed light on the fact that health insurance is still a bleeding protfolio for insurers citing Rs 5,000-6,000 crore in premiums and claims at Rs 7,000-8,000 crore. He lauded the insurers for their commitment to the development of the health care.
Mr Anil Swaroop, who heads RSBY, informed that the scheme has touched 5-million mark and underscored he need to make it a scalable, replicable and sustainable model.
Other important points that came up during the conference were improvement in communicating with client, proper training of sales staff, use of technology to have access to remote areas, standardization of definitions and procedures and coverage for pre-existing diseases which constitute 90% of the reasons for claims being rejected.
Finally, the conference has agreed that a health insurance architecture for the poor is poor itself and need to build a world-class health care architecture.

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