expensive health insurance in india

Ramesh Tiwari
Has inflation come down? This is what government statistics are telling these days. But this is not the case with health insurance. There are reports that this year it has become costlier by about 15%. To add to that, governments are charging 18% GST on health insurance. For the poor, the central government has given the benefit of Ayushman Yojana. It is believed that the rich can easily afford the cost of any disease. The middle class gets stuck in the middle, which can be taken to the BPL category by the huge hospital expenses. These are called ‘out of pocket’ medical expenses. The report of the World Health Organization, which came out in March last year, says that due to such medical expenses, more than 50 million people in India become poor every year.

To avoid this poverty, people take shelter of health insurance. The special thing is that when you are young and the companies selling it come to you, you do not pay attention to them. But when you feel the need for them when you get old, then these companies do not give you the price. Buying a health policy is also not easy. Companies promote selling health insurance through agents, which makes your insurance costlier. Buying health insurance directly online is less convenient and more complicated.

Whenever you take a new health policy, the treatment of certain diseases will not be covered till a specific time. Some companies sell such schemes, in which the room rent of the hospital will not be paid in full. Whenever you are admitted, you will also have to pay some money. There are many problems with a policy that you buy yourself. If you are an employee, then there is ease in the policy provided by the employer. A large number of people live on the basis of the health policy provided by the employer. The difficulty is that the day the job was lost, the health insurance also ended on the same day.

It is difficult to choose which scheme is good in the web of different schemes. Under pressure from the government, insurance companies are selling a standard policy, Aarogya Sanjeevani. Every company has to sell this scheme and with similar features. But companies are not interested in selling it. They themselves start counting its shortcomings so that you buy their expensive policy. If you are not satisfied with an insurance company, you can port any policy from one company to another. Just like the SIM port in the case of mobile service. The advantage is that if you port the old policy, the benefit you have earned will not go waste. But companies also do not provide porting facility easily. Insurance regulator IRDA will start a portal named Bima Sugam for this, but its launch is also being postponed.