Most-Important Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic

The Critical Importance of Ensuring Health and Wellness

Health insurance comes in handy in the case of medical emergencies, hence becomes an absolute necessity for individuals. However, ensuring health and wellness, as a preventive measure you can adopt to ensure that the probability of critical medical situations is not only mitigated but also avoided in certain situations. The biggest lessons COVID-19 taught us in this domain are:

• Mental health is a thing:COVID-19 has impacted us in many ways and the foremost one is how we deal with stress, anxiety, and a lifestyle that incorporates a healthy mind. Mental wellness has become as important as physical wellness. This has resulted in an increased desire to learn meditation, yoga, and other activities that keep the mind focused, less distracted, and disturbed.
• Maintaining hygiene cannot be ignored at any cost: Personal hygiene demands ownership as no one will do it for us. From washing hands frequently throughout the day, especially before eating meals to ensuring regular baths, coughing/sneezing with our mouths covered, etc., personal and preventive hygiene has become the number one priority for everyone.
• What we eat matters a lot more than we think it does: Food is fuel for the engine called our bodies. Their function depends upon what we intake every day. Healthy and hygienic food is the most important preventive operation we can do for keeping our well-being at par with medical requirements.  Healthy eating habits include intake of all essential nutrients in our daily diet, limiting the intake of sugar, unhealthy fats, and salt, as well as practicing food hygiene habits.
• Physical health/fitness is no more just an option, it is a compulsory requisite:The most obvious one on the list. It is needless to say that being fit ensures a host of benefits for our general wellbeing. Physical fitness can be achieved in many ways and not just by going outside. Even if it means walking 500 steps in our house every day, it has become important to ensure a consistent fitness regime that keeps our body fit and reduces the risk of borderline diseases including fatal ones like a cardiovascular attack.

The Need for Motivating People towards Preventive Healthcare

A percentage of those who know about health insurance schemes still face difficulty when putting in money and very few go ahead and invest in one. In such a case, a slight push can do wonders. The pandemic has proved to be the much-needed push for all of us to invest in the right health insurance.

Having said that, healthcare certainly is the biggest reason to invest in an insurance scheme but is not the only reason.

Financial coverage for medical treatment serves a strong purpose too. Along with this income tax benefits on policy premiums is a financially motivating factor for people to go ahead and buy one.

Alongside this, health insurance companies have started to ramp up their service by providing some additional benefits to the customers with the insurance cover like wellness programs, rebate on premium for multi-year plans, fitness sessions, etc. that further added to the mass awareness of health insurance in India.

For both medical and these additional reasons, the sale of insurance plans in India post-pandemic rapidly increased to 55% as compared to 32% before the pandemic, showing a positive sign of the increasing consciousness of preventive healthcare in India.

Digital is destined to be the Way Forward

Periodic lockdowns in various parts of the country gave an unprecedented boost to the adoption of a digital medium for almost every possible thing. Buying health insurance online in the digital healthcare system also gained a lot of fire during the pandemic.

This was followed by the need to enhance online portals and increase awareness for digital adoption by the masses to ensure seamless, quick, and hassle-free health insurance policy adoption. Furthermore, growing digital adoption is becoming crucial because:

• It helps to centralize information for better management
• Creates a personalized journey for customers
• Simplifies and improves the entire process of buying health insurance
• Made it much easier to compare policies across platforms and get in touch with customer care for immediate help

Digital adoption of health insurance has now come into the limelight and it will certainly be the only way forward. From buying a health insurance policy online to renewing, canceling, or even porting it to another company, digital will serve as the key medium for all our health insurance needs.

Health Insurance Schemes are the Need of the Hour

As per the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), the majority of Indian states have less than 50% households having one member covered under a health insurance scheme, i.e., half the population has still been unaware of health insurance even in 2021.

One of the biggest reasons for such low health insurance coverage in India has been credited to the lack of awareness amongst people about the benefits of health insurance policies.

Moreover, since medical insurance cover is optional, those of us who have been made aware are still reluctant to subscribe/buy one because of the myriad benefits that health insurance schemes carry with them.

To Conclude

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly proved to have exposed certain shortcomings in the present scenario of the healthcare domain. Not only this, the crucial need for requisite awareness for health insurance amongst masses has come out as a major highlighted concern too, citing the criticality of preventive healthcare for every individual.

Perhaps, the biggest lesson learned from the pandemic is to be financially protected as a medical emergency can arrive anytime, that too unannounced. Without proper planning, uncertain events can leave us with personal/financial grief and unplanned liabilities at the time of an emergency.

You must keep in mind all the above-mentioned factors before buying or renewing health insurance. It is important to ensure that a plan is comprehensive and provides us with all the coverage to suit your requirements.