The majority of people now consider health insurance as a necessity to be financially future-ready to fight unforeseen medical emergencies.
The Covid-19 pandemic has not only killed lakhs of people but has also hit the economy hard due to repeated lockdowns that were imposed to arrest its spread. As a result, scores of people have either lost their job or faced pay cuts pushing them towards financial bankruptcy.
Moreover, with hospitalization bills running into lakhs during the second wave of Covid-19, the pandemic has hit families’ finances even harder – wiping out lifelong savings and forcing many people to borrow money.
Millennials and younger working professionals too have not been spared, and the unfolding Covid situation has been a brutal eye-opener for this segment. This used to be one customer segment that had little awareness of health insurance covers until now and even otherwise was more content with employer-issued group insurance plans that barely met their healthcare needs.
According to a survey, the proportion of people interested in buying health insurance to cover new age diseases in India has increased 71 percent after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic compared to just 10 percent people interested in doing so in the pre-Covid era.
So, the majority of people now consider health insurance as a necessity to be financially future-ready to fight unforeseen medical emergencies.
As per Vital, an online platform that provides a simplified and easy means to digitally access policies, the pandemic is already creating huge shifts in millennials’ attitudes to health insurance.
“The pandemic has changed a lot of assumptions we have about our health. What we are seeing now is a definite increase by millennials who are adopting good health cover early. What’s more, is that they are looking for online platforms that provide digital policy benefits that they can use to manage and improve their health,” said Jayan Mathews, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Vital.
“As much as 60 percent of all registered members at online platform Vital are between the ages of 20 to 35,” Mathews revealed.
