Mr M Ramaprasad, Member (Non-Life), Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, (IRDA), called for evolution of a standard protocol for treatment of various diseases and their costs for spreading Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in India.
While addressing CII Health Insurance Summit in the capital today, Mr Ramaprasad said that absence of a standard protocol for treatment has led to lack of uniformity in the cost of treatments. “We have to have a standard protocols In these areas to work out appropriate insurance products that are affordable to consumers and at the same time do not adversely affect the bottom lines of service providers,” he said. The IRDA is very seriously looking at these issues and at the same time, involvement of all stakeholders is critical to arrive at an optimal matrix, he added.
The IRDA member said that health insurance in India has shown an impressive growth in the last 10 years or so going by the number of products introduced and the coverage. But there are challenges to be addressed to in a time bound manner. In this regard, he underlined the need for introducing short term products at affordable prices in a continuous manner.
Mr Ramaprasaid said that with the increased coverage of universal health system, the responsibility of IRDA has considerably increased. The claims o consumers have to be settled expeditiously since delays in transferring proceeds would affect the faith of the customers in the system. In this regard, he mentioned that some private service providers have already taken positive measures to address the delays in claims and the delivery systems were definitely in a better position than it was before.
The IRDA member said that private and public funding should go hand in hand in ushering universal health coverage. The Governments’ contributions in meeting the health needs have to be clearly spelt out. At the same time, attractive insurance products should be rolled out to take care of that segment of people who could afford to spend money on health needs. He also said that in States like AP, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the state is funding the cost of insurance products. But it is debatable whether such models can be applied to other states where there could be budgetary constraints. He also referred to the infrastructural gaps in the healthcare products and said that IRDA was looking at the grey areas.
A Vaidheesh, Chairman, CII Health Insurance Summit, said that there is a need to focus on designing and implementing the framework for consumer awareness on health insurance and to create awareness about common service standards across insurers, providers and other stakeholders involved in healthcare delivery through health insurance.
He said that a multi-prong approach to raising awareness about benefits of health insurance is needed to create demand amongst all consumer categories. In addition, consumer perception is also needs to be enhanced by highlighting the millions of claims paid annually. This would all need to be complemented by an even more fundamental and long term education campaign which introduced concepts of risk mitigation and healthcare financing within civic studies and financial literacy of students so that over time the entire population is highly aware and conversant with all forms of insurance including health insurance.