30 Per Cent Of Plum’s Clients Have Parental Covers In Their GHI Plans: Plum's Study
Plum, an employee health insurance platform, says that 30% of its clients have parental covers as part of their Group Health Insurance (GHI) policies. Most of these companies are first-time insurance buyers with an average employee strength less than 100 and average age of employees being 30 years and parents being 57.5 years.
The pandemic has acted as a major catalyst to fuel the rise of GHI adoption with parental covers among companies. These are either fully employer sponsored covers or voluntary parental covers wherein the decision to opt for parental covers rests with the employees. Plum has also witnessed an increase in average sum insured in its policies from Rs. 3 Lakh to Rs. 5 Lakh per family over the past two years.
While these numbers indicate a strong sense of responsibility among relatively early-age startups and enterprises in safeguarding the health and well-being of their employees and their families, this is only the beginning. Data shows that most parents insured are at a retirement age, which makes them dependent on working members for their wellbeing. For companies that do not insure their employees’ parents, there could be a loss of peace of mind and productivity. India also has the maximum out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure among G20 countries, which pushes nearly 60 million people into poverty every year (National Health Authority, 2020), which means one chronic disease can drain a family’s lifetime savings.
Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder and CEO, Plum said, “Our parents have played an instrumental role in shaping our future and therefore it is our moral responsibility to provide them with medical security at a time they need it most. In a country where one out of five people have diabetes and a majority of elders have pre-existing conditions, group health insurance is the best option to extend comprehensive healthcare to the elderly. Availability of products is no longer a challenge but lack of awareness is. At Plum, we always counsel our clients to include parental covers and guide them on the best possible plan customized for each organization. We are seeing good results and are hopeful of having all our clients include parental covers.”
Including parental covers in group health insurance comes with several advantages such as no age bar for parents, no pre-medical check-ups required, coverage is applicable from day one and it covers pre-existing diseases among others. Moreover, organisations can customize their policies as per their requirements.
Kriti Rastogi, Director of Placements at Plum, said, “Years of product innovation have ensured that today enough avenues are open for customers to get their parents covered. Besides the regular standard group health insurance plans, nowadays customers have a host of top-up plans which are affordable and easily accessible. Products such as voluntary parental covers allow corporates especially small business owners, to extend health insurance to the parents of employees without being burdened by a huge cost. I believe owing to our awareness drive and sound counsel there is an increasing interest among our clients to extend health and wellness benefits to everyone in the employees’ families.”
Plum’s Policy:
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Types of parental covers available:
Sr. No. | Type | Details |
1 | Standard policy | Parental cover paid by the employer; parents of 100% of the employees enrolled into the plan |
2 | Voluntary parental cover | Parental cover paid in part (or full) by the employee, along with employees having a choice to enroll their parent into the plan |
3 | Super top-up | A top-up plan for employees (at their own expense) to increase the cover for their parents |
About 75 million people above the age of 60 in India suffer from some chronic disease, as per the world's largest study on the aged — the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI). Health insurance penetration within this age group is amongst the lowest owing to lack of awareness, accessibility and affordability. Further, individual retail policies have their own restrictions for on-boarding senior citizens. Therefore, in order to facilitate medical security for parents it is extremely important to include them under group health covers.
Plum works with over 1500 organizations, where a significant portion are first time buyers of Group Health Insurance. It counsels its clients on the best health and wellness benefits, and strongly advocates customizing benefits to suit the healthcare needs of their employees. The definition of a modern family is changing and is no longer restricted to erstwhile norms, insurers today are fully cognizant of that and are being progressive with new age covers. Organizations must take a cue.
