Was medical insurance brought to India only to fatten the already fat insurance moneybag, or to provide some relief from soaring medical costs to the general populace?

Let’s face it: the profit margins cannot be the only considerations in medical insurance. The American example is a recent good one.

Here we have a classic fat-cat situation with medical insurance companies planning to elbow out senior citizens from medical cover from their offspring’s policies, without offering any suitable package that will benefit the seniors with a reasonably priced cover. 

Are they so unaware of ground realities that they do not know that the majority of those covered belong to a generation when retirement planning was virtually unheard of?  Those generations earned and spent it all on a house, if possible and the education of their children that they may live better than them.  Whatever little was saved was spent on higher education and marriages. A tiny majority qualified for pensions now eroded with galloping inflation.

In that scenario, medical coverage from their working children was a great relief in old age.  But within less than five years of introduction, those insurance bigwigs in their ivory towers argue that the maximum outgo is for old people … that becomes misuse of an insurance policy that was created for this very purpose!

Executives, who were virtually railroaded into it with the offer that the premiums would earn tax deductions, are now being shooed away – now they are railroaded away from it with an additional premium, so that they may leave their old parents in the lurch, arguing that the extra burden is beyond their budgets.  In the bargain, no one stops to think whether that burden would be easy on the budget of a pensioner or a senior citizen clinging to old savings against the harsh grab of rising inflation all round.

What makes one ponder more is the fact that these so-called mediclaim companies were set up for public benefit.  Brings one to the question:  public benefit?   Which public are we talking about here – the general public which consists of working people and their aged retired parents or only the segment of the public that works in these companies and their top bosses whose only consideration is the annual balance sheet showing a healthy profit?

Once again, it is the business elites versus the people of India.

Jai Ho!