What is keeping Indians away from health insurance?

livemint.com:

Higher premiums and lack of urgency along with high complexity are the prime reason for many Indians not buying health insurance, find a survey on the trend among insurance buyers in India. Lack of affordability, higher premiums, difficulty in understanding health insurance clauses, and insufficient funds, emerged as the main obstruction for people who are willing to buy health insurance, according to the policybazaar.com's report, titled ‘How India buys Insurance’. As per the survey, 43 per cent of all the respondents who didn't take any health insurance cited high premiums as the main reason for not doing so.

Out of the total people who participated in the survey, 19% didn't even understand how a health insurance policy works. 33% of the respondents didn't find any urgency in buying health insurance. Notably, higher premiums were one of the main reasons for lapse among health insurance lapsers.

47% of the health insurance lapsers cited higher health insurance premiums as the main reason. The report also mentions that health insurance premiums became a highly expensive post-COVID pandemic. “In 2021, the country registered the highest medical inflation rate among the Asian countries at 14 percent," said the report.

In the report, it was found that most of the respondents in the survey purchased their health insurance in 2020. Out of the total insurers, 22% purchased their insurance in 2020. On the other hand, 5% of the insurers who participated in the survey bought their health insurance in 2022.