'Transparency in hospital costs is key to affordable health premiums'

Medical inflation plays a major role in pricing health insurance policies and hospitals can help in ensuring affordable premiums by maintaining transparency in costs. While insurers are regulated, and are answerable to Irdai whenever they hike premiums, hospitals aren’t. Highlighting the need for greater transparency in hospital costs, Krishnan Ramachandran, managing director and chief executive officer, Niva Bupa Health Insurance, says the healthcare industry needs to move towards evidence-based care and adoption of newer standards and protocols that can reduce the financial burden of a patient. In an interview with Mint, Ramachandran also talked about the benefits offered by Aspire, a new product launched by Niva Bupa that caters to young India so that they can secure themselves against any sudden hospitalization. Edited excerpts:

- Aprajita Sharma

How is Aspire different from other health plans in the market?

Aspire has been specifically developed for young India. The product has several attractive industry-first features that would influence Gen Z and millennials to consider purchasing health insurance at an early age and accumulate the benefits over time.

Aspire will offer comprehensive maternity coverage called M-iracle which covers not only normal and C-section deliveries but also alternative reproductive treatments, such as in-vitro fertilization or, IVF, besides surrogacy and adoption. It would cover newborns from day 1 and offers guaranteed issuance to them. It offers a future-ready benefit for young consumers that will be shared with their spouses as well soon after marriage. All waiting periods covered by the consumer will be passed on to the spouse also (including maternity waiting period). Moreover, we will offer guaranteed issuance to the spouse immediately after a subscriber’s marriage. Another interesting feature is ‘fast forward’ in a multi-tenure policy, where the entire base and maternity sum insured will be combined and can be used from Day 1 itself.

With Aspire, our policyholders can get medical treatment anywhere in the world and not just India. It also offers a feature, ‘WellConsult’, which covers out-patient department (OPD) treatment and a ‘wellness wallet’ that covers tele/video and physical consultations, and prescribed diagnostics and medicines, besides access to gym memberships, nutritionists and dieticians, and emotional wellness sessions.