Emergency corpus or health insurance: what works best

Policy fine print—caps, sub-limits, deductibles—often reduces payouts more than you realize

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Shilpa Arora, co-founder and chief operating officer, Insurance Samadhan; and Mahavir Chopra, founder, Beshak.org.

The venue was the National Stock Exchange in Mumbai. The agenda: investments, markets and wealth creation.

But one session shifted the focus from just making money to protecting it—because one medical emergency can wipe out years of disciplined investing. And yet, despite the obvious risk, health insurance remains under-penetrated across Indian households.

At the Mint Money Festival, Mahavir Chopra, founder of Beshak.org, and Shilpa Arora, co-founder and chief operating officer of Insurance Samadhan, confronted an uncomfortable question: what’s really broken in India’s health insurance system? For a product that sees the highest consumer complaints within the insurance industry, can families realistically skip insurance and rely on a large emergency fund instead?

Here's what they said.

The root cause of health insurance complaints is simple: expectation mismatch.

As per Chopra this happens because the person who is setting the expectation (the sales agent) and the person delivering the expectation (who handles claims) are different people within the same company.