Health Assurance can bring the focus back on preventive healthcare to India

Health insurance also over the years hasnt expanded beyond more than being a system of payment for sick care and hospitalisation and hasn’t incentivised itself to keep people healthy. Companies have had the opportunity to solve the limitations healthcare through employer-provided or employer-subsidised health care for individuals and their families, but they have limited themselves to only providing health insurance, which only 10 per cent of individuals use on average.

Healthcare in India has had its challenges over the last 8 decades. Limitations of access, quality and cost exist to this day. Health issues have been on the rise with India having a sizable number of the world’s diabetics, hypertension cases, cardiac and pulmonary cases and mental health afflicted, among others. The healthcare system too has had negligible focus on preventive healthcare and is largely focused on treating those who knock on its doors with sickness.
The WHO definition of health underscores that it is not just the absence of sickness but complete physical, mental and emotional well being. Despite the Government’s best efforts to provide health insurance to all Indians especially, the lower end of the economic spectrum, it is still a health insurance solution that provides a form of payment, not a preventive healthcare solution.
Health insurance also over the years hasnt expanded beyond more than being a system of payment for sick care and hospitalisation and hasn’t incentivised itself to keep people healthy. Companies have had the opportunity to solve the limitations healthcare through employer-provided or employer-subsidised health care for individuals and their families, but they have limited themselves to only providing health insurance, which only 10 per cent of individuals use on average.

There is a gap here that requires a new system of healthcare that has a primary focus on keeping people healthy, while providing care for them when they are sick and a system of payment for sick care (insurance), that system is Health Assurance.

Health Assurance is a new healthcare system whose primary objective is to create good health (complete physical, mental and social well-being) and prevent disease, while providing accessible, affordable and effective care for sickness. Health Assurance combines data, technology and preventive medical care to deliver an empathetic people-centric healthcare experience that will make people healthier than before and reduce their need for sick care, while providing for it.

Health Assurance combines the provider of healthcare with the payer of healthcare and allows a person or a company to be assured of better health, for the cost of the health insurance premium that they pay – for themselves or their individuals. From an individual’s point of view, they will feel like the entire healthcare and insurance system is working for their unique condition, something that has never been experienced before in India.