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 units and big traders in the State to add to it generously against assured tax deduction. I am sure many big industrial houses running their own social schemes as part of corporate social responsibility are doing so only because they perceive the state-sponsored schemes as the biggest sieves on the earth. A public-private partnership trust can administer the corpus and the lure of premium paying public will in its wake spawn private hospitals in every nook and corner. It is certainly not a rosy picture that I am trying to paint against ground reality. Mark my words, healthcare insurance is going to be the next big revolution in India after Sam Pitroda’s telecom revolution in the eighties and the nineties.

Health Insurance is a huge opportunity to raise resources for creating healthcare infrastructure. There is no denying that IRDA comes up with some directives sporadically, especially for the senior citizens. But there has to be urgent, concerted action in this direction. There is a time for everything. With the economy growing at close to 9% with hopes of it reaching the magical double digit in a few years, now is the time to act positively. Maybe, the Planning Commission can goad IRDA to move quickly.

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…

Health insurance is an important thing to have if you get ill or injure yourself badly enough to need medical attention. There are many companies that will sell you health insurance. You may even get free health insurance from your employer. If you don’t get free health insurance, or health insurance that’s paid in part by your employer, then you might want to find some good, cheap health insurance to protect you if you get sick. The health insurance cost will depend largely on the type of care …

And the last model is the linked model where the NGO collects the premium and passes it on to insurance companies like the New India Insurance or the National Insurance Company. Patients go to private providers usually and get care. Unfortunately, here it is not a cashless system so they have to pay the provider at the time of illness. The patient then submits the bills to the insurance company via the NGO and receives the reimbursement (usually after a lag period of 1- 3 months). Advantage o…

In recent years, community health insurance (CHI) has emerged as a possible means of: (1) improving access to health care among the poor; and (2) protecting the poor from indebtedness and impoverishment resulting from medical expenditures. The World
Health Report 2000, for example, noted that prepayment schemes represent the most effective way to protect people from the costs of health care, and called for investigation into mechanisms to bring the poor into such schemes (World Health Organisat…