Health Insurance Portability: The customer is king again
Health insurance has become portable and you are now free to move to another provider and carry along all the credits gained for having been loyal.
November 22, 2011 / 10:41 IST
By BankBazaar.com
Loyalty to Company A cannot/will not be rewarded by competitor company B. Why should they?Why not? That is exactly the question the many experts and the IRDA raised a few years ago when discussing the issue of health insurance and the transfer of credits gained in a situation where a customer shifts from Health Insurer A to B. This intervention by the IRDA has now resulted in happy news for customers availing health insurance, especially those who are not satisfied with their existing insurer. Effective 01 October 2011, Health Insurance has become portable and you are now free to move to another provider and carry along all the credits gained for having been loyal. To get a better perspective of the whole idea of Portability we need to explore how things worked before 01/10/11. Let us say you were a customer, who, had a Health Insurance policy with ABC Company, and were not satisfied with their service. You approach company XYZ to transfer your policy and they would have said that you will be treated as a new policyholder. Meaning, all the benefits you had accrued by regularly paying your premium to the earlier insurer would stand nullified and you would need to build your loyalty from scratch. The IRDA defines portability as -
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