India is considered the leading country promoting medical tourism-and now it is moving into a new area of medical outsourcing,” where subcontractors provide services to the overburdened medical care systems in western countries.
India’s National Health Policy declares that treatment of foreign patients is legally an “export” and deemed “eligible for all fiscal incentives extended to export earnings.” Government and private sector studies in India estim…

If administered properly, healthcare insurance sector has a huge potential in India and it can be leveraged to realize the dream to provide ‘health for all’. I wonder if the government can create a corpus to fund the insurance premium to be paid on behalf of the lower income groups and those below poverty line. The state governments have to do this and each state government can initiate a fund with a nominal contribution of some Rs. 50 crores and invite the industrial uni…

A US study has found that insured cancer patients live longer than the uninsured ones. Uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years as those with private coverage. The study found that people without health insurance are less likely to get recommended cancer screening tests and when these patients finally do get diagnosed, their cancer is likely to have spread. For all this, uninsured are believed to account for just a fraction of US cancer deaths. It is around 4…

The burgeoning health insurance sector is set to see some far-reaching changes.

Specialized health insurance subsidiaries and allowing agents of one insurance company to sell health products of other general insurance companies are two of the major proposals.

A committee set up to look into the issue of senior citizens and the health insurance sector mooted these proposals.

The Insurance Regulatory & Development Authority (IRDA) had, some time back, talked about the formulation of new…