The whole world is in the midst of a catastrophe triggered early last year by the Covid-19 virus. The monetary and physical overall health of all stands unpredictable. In such a situation, insurance coverage is the finest rescuer. Those who are protected with appropriate overall health insurance coverage plans can hope for finest doable therapy and meet their health-related expenditures without the need of their personal finances getting adversely impacted or depleted. Similarly, these who have taken sufficient life insurance coverage for themselves are leaving behind some monetary corpus for their loved ones to hang on to till they are in a position to fend for themselves.
Financial protection
This magical protection by means of smaller month-to-month or periodical outgo can save lives from monetary crisis. But regrettably the trail of miseries that corona victims have been leaving behind for dependent family members scripts a really pathetic story .For this escapable plight of the persons I would point my fingers towards the insurers who do not conduct their organization with the commitment to provide monetary protection to every eligible person in the society by means of various insurance coverage plans.
This pandemic will have to force the insurers to rethink their organization in respect of item design and style, premium prices, policy circumstances and privileges as also about the approaches, medium and tactics to distribute the solutions in the marketplace to realize complete coverage for all the eligible people. Selling insurance coverage is not just a organization to garner substantial profit by denying rightful rewards to the insured persons by exploiting the fine print though settling claims. Selling insurance coverage is a sort of social duty which demands a missionary zeal to serve the persons individually and the society at significant.
On the otherhand, the pandemic has designed the want for various variants of insurance coverage also. During lockdowns persons have lost jobs, partially or completely lost their revenue, entrepreneurs have faced partial or complete organization interruptions major to suspension of production andeven comprehensive or partial suspension of demand. Such a situation has brought on defaults in EMI payments and accentuated the monetary hardship when one or more family members have fallen sick due to the corona virus necessitating hospitalization or even prolonged therapy. All these elements emerging in the present situation have been maybe beyond the imagination of the insurers therefore even these who adopted overall health insurance coverage policy or life insurance coverage policy have discovered their policies woefully deficient in nature and extent of cover.
New regions for insurance coverage
Several new regions have emerged through the pandemic which call for urgent initiative by the insurers, major to development possibilities as effectively as client satisfaction. Health coverage through overseas trip following flight cancellation, forced quarantine at foreign areas at personal expense, expense on rent for accommodation not in use, expense on vaccination, expense on preventive gears and on Ayurvedic and other immunity boosters as also on cremation and burial.
The pandemic has pointed out the deficiencies not only in the scope of coverage but also in the nature of coverage. Insurers nonetheless design and style their solutions, delivery and service culture on the models introduced by insurers globally who have been really conservative by tradition. They do not want to innovate and danger their profitability. Current possibilities in insurtech, nonetheless, facilitate expense cutting in a large way. Hence harnessing the web of factors, artificial intelligence and information analytics can aid to provide expense productive and wide ranging cover to the policyholders. What the sector requires is a mindset that recognises the possibilities supplied by the pandemic to look at its organization and solutions really differently. The pandemic has not only brought to surface the deficiencies but also the possibilities.
The writer is former MD & CEO, Star Union Dai-ichi Life