Mumbai:
In the last few months, the insurance regulator IRDAI has only allowed five per cent rise in the premiums of few health insurance products, said D. V. S. Ramesh, general manager,IRDAI.
“Out of 200 health insurance products, only 50 have seen rate rise,’’ he said while participating in a panel discussion on Thursday at the 14th Health Insurance Summit 2020, organized by CII.
He further said that average age of a health insurance policy holder in the country is around 40-45 and insurers should design incentive schemes to ensure young prospective policy holders to buy health covers.
“We have 45 per cent of our population under 25 who can buy health insurance, Health insurers should also ensure preventive care as government has already announced setting up of 1 lakh wellness centres.The focus now should be on ensuring primary care to all sections of the population.,’’ he added.
Participating in the discussion, Atul Sahay, CMD, New India Assurance, said to bring down the healthcare cost, to make healthcare affordable, it is necessary to use the primary and secondary healthcare centres..
There should be a cap on the hospital expenses,’’ he said.
Earlier, addressing the event, Subhash C Khuntia,chairman,IRDAI urged the insurance companies to develop more disease specific cover and go into semi urban and rural areas,to further expand the reach of health insurance in India,
He added that insurance companies should develop more disease specific products.
He also said that there should be proper treatment protocols for the various ailments and health insurers should adhere to such proposals, as there is a perception among the public the private sector healthcare facility do unnecessary diagnostic test.
“I would suggest that voluntary disclosures be made by all the hospitals and health providers so that public will chose looking at disclosures given by each hospitals where they would like to go and performance indicators might be also disclosed,” added Khuntia.
Recently second window of the regulatory sandbox was closed and Irdai has received 176 proposals and many are from the health insurance sector.
Malti Jaiswal, Advisor, NHA stated that there is a change in pattern in the utilization of care.
“Our attention should be shifted towards the standardization of care, while looking at the overall outcomes. We have to ensure primary care is very robust, be it primary health care centers or clinics that are providing services to the public at large expressed,'' said Jaiswal.
India is faced with twin challenges of high prevalence of communicable diseases and risk of premature deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The overall healthcare spend in India is 4.2% of GDP (2018), lowest amongst BRICS counties, while global health care expenditure average amounts to approximately 10.2%.
This is further exacerbated as the Government healthcare expenditure has largely been stagnant during last 10 years (~1.2% of GDP in 2018).
This has resulted into high out of pocket (OOP) spend on healthcare (65%). There is an urgent need to make quality healthcare accessible to all Indians along with sustainability for healthcare providers