The COVID-19 pandemic led to a massive demand for health insurance policies, the data released by online distributor Policybazaar.com has revealed.
The portal sold four lakh health insurance policies between April-Dec 2020 amounting to a total sum insured of over Rs 7 lakh crore.
Policybazaar also announced that in the April-December period, the website had one crore visitors; of which 65 per cent were less than the age of 40 years, 25 per cent were between the age group of 40 - 60 years and 10 per cent were above the age of 60 years.
The data also shows that the health crisis led to a large number of people without pre-existing diseases opting to buy health insurance. According to the online distributor, the share of policies bought by those with pre-existing conditions was 30 per cent, with the most common illnesses being diabetes — 40 per cent and hypertension — 25 per cent.
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Besides this, 20 per cent of customers opted to pay for multi-year policies in single installments, which helped them get a discount.
The changes in underwriting guidelines and digitisation of various processes in the insurance sector also proved to be highly helpful for the customers. 65 per cent of the total policies sold during the April-December 2020 period on Policybazaar were sold through ‘Straight Through Process’ – based on customer declaration and were issued instantly. The remaining 34 per cent were sold through telemedical and only one per cent needed a physical medical check-up, which earlier stood at 15 per cent prior to changes in underwriting guidelines.
