Collapsing of health insurance and mediclaims, new state policies

Vastavikta Bhagat

We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society. Thus, we set out to collect stories of fears, joys, agilities, fragilities, friendships, networks, collectives, home, work, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, privileges, marginalizations, migrations, desperation, gender, equity, etc. The glossary as a method became useful to reflect on this granularity of experiences and account for slippages during these times. These spatio-temporal stories, when read together or as individual instances produce a new sense of the emergent contemporary. This framework also allows us to speculate on the kind of world we will inhabit once the storm has passed. We draw on multiple readings to bring out the nuances and patterns of social life produced in a pandemic. This we hope would allow us to collectively reflect on the restructured ideas of the self, the collective, society, space, and time. The pandemic saw a centralized collapse of systems including healthcare, education, governance, etc. Similarly, the health insurance sector faced the burden of the pandemic especially in the second wave.

RS: So another thing which is also happening on the backend, which has come out recently is the ….the insurance companies and I've been seeing these closely because my dad is associated with them.. But even their structure is, … they don't have anything in their banks so that they're able to give those claims and the rate at which the cases that they're getting and the claims which are there... although they're legitimate......a delay to sort of even the treatment, a lot of other procedures that come post-money literally are delayed.

PS: Your father works with the insurance companies is it RS?

RS: yeah, he is…

PS: So he is saying that the insurance companies don't have money for the states?

RS: Not like that like, so what has happened is that the backend of the insurance company...means the people who will process the claim….verify this is there or not that staff is almost cut in half.. their staff is infected. So whenever like people are putting their claims, to process the claim and then okay and what happened is that... so basically these companies collected money and first wave mein a lot of them they gave away a lot. So right now even they don't have enough to supply for all the claims that they are getting so even the premiums of these offers increased a lot. So if you now renew your insurance there is ideally a jump of at least 5 to 9k than what it was before. And that people are not able to deal with this gap also right now...

RC: So I forgot to mention about these couple of state policies that have matlab jo ek toh teen mahine pehle introduce hua hain and it is called Indira Gandhi rasoi yojana. So, where you get eight rupees mein ek person ka food… aath rupay mein khana khau.. safety se khana milta hain wahan pe and dusra abhi shuru hua hain ek mahine pehle… its called jan adhari yojana...matlab… naam suggest karta hain but iska lena kuch aadhar card se nahi hain… iska lena dena health insurance se hain… toh jo bhi log abhi effect...matlab mediclaim se… health insurance se nahi… toh sarkaar paise degi…..first COVID related jo bhi treatment hogi...agar woh government hospital jayenge toh totally totally free aur private hospital mein bhi jan adhar card agar ban jata hain aur aap lekar jaate ho toh 75% mediclaim milta hain.. So that is … ab yahan pe state policies are there that are working...i do not know the status of other states.. But ...aa central toh kuch ho nahi raha hain.

PS: Tum Rajasthan ki baat kar rahe ho na?

RC: Haan, Rajasthan ki.

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