From Oct 1, switch your health insurer in 7 days

Your health insurance portability will be a quick affair now. Insurers will have to share the data on policies to be migrated within seven days from the date of request.

This has been mandated by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) in its final guidelines on the portability, communicated to the insurers by a circular.

“We have just received the circular dated September 9, 2011, which also clarifies that portability would be applicable only from a non-life company to another,” Mr B. Subrahmanyam, Vice-President, Bharati AXA General Insurance Company, told Business Line on Tuesday.

Health insurance portability is to come into force from October 1.

Those who wish to migrate need to apply at least 45 days prior to the date of renewal. The bonus accrued, if any, would be carried forward by the new insurer after migration, says the circular.

Apart from individual policies, portability is also extended to ‘family-floating' policies where cover is offered to select family members of the insured.

PREPARED

“Internally, we are prepared to execute portability and have already done the test-run of an exclusive portal,” Mr T. V. Ramalingam, Head – Underwriting, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, said. The portal would be the key for portability as information sharing on a policyholder's data is routed through it.

With this data, the credit for pre-exiting diseases can be given to customers immediately if they are migrating to another insurer.

“From our side, everything is in place to execute portability,” Mr Sanjay Datta, Head – Customer Service, ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company, said.

IMPACT

“There will be some migrations but the impact on business could be slow initially,” Mr Datta said. Those customers who have some issues with their existing health cover providers might opt for migration, while others might take time to understand the process.

The portability would be very ‘beneficial' for the customers, but smaller companies with good service might also stand to gain, said Mr Subrahmanyam.

Health insurance portability was originally supposed to come into force from July1, 2011. The regulator had put off the date to October 1 on requests from the industry.

Source : Business Line