Plans

The public sector insurer is reopening files of the repudiated health claims during last financial year to explore ways and means to honour them, according to Ms Renu Jain, Head of Health Insurance, LIC of India.

“When we ask for some additional information, some policyholders don’t provide them forcing us to decline the claims. As part of our increased focus on service and claims, we are reopening these files,” she said.

The objective behind the move is “to further improve the perception of claims and services.”

The corporation is also “going an extra mile” by sending its own personnel to the policyholders to collect the pending/required documents.

“We believe that in health insurance business, service and perception about the insurer play a crucial role. We are in the process of improving this further,” she added.

The corporation is also planning to launch a toll-free number to help the customers in various ways.

LIC, which has two health insurance products (Health Protection Plus and Jeevan Arogya), will also leverage its customer base in the life segment to expand business in health.

Huge potential
“There is a huge potential in health segment which remains to be harnessed. LIC has approximately 23 crore policyholders to whom health insurance could also be marketed,” the official said.

Of a proposed policy budget of 4.26 crore during the present financial year, 5 per cent of policies should come from health segment, Ms Jain said.

In the year ended March 31, 2011, the health segment accounted for roughly 0.5 per cent of total policies of LIC.

The response to ‘Jeevan Arogya’, a health scheme launched a couple of weeks ago to offer comprehensive hospitalisation benefits for the whole family including in-laws, was “highly encouraging”, Ms Jain said.