IRDA had asked insurers not to refuse health insurance on a routine basis
IRDA had asked insurance firms for paying claims, even if they were submitted late because of genuine reasons. The intention was noble, but the absence of penalty for insurers and didn’t forget of the ground realities of claims rejection. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) said to life and non-life companies for asking them not to decline claims on technical grounds of delay in filing may come as a relief to policyholders.
There had been a number of complaints to IRDA about refusing of claims that were genuine. Various media reports had been published that indicate that insurance companies couldn’t reject a claim, even if the request came in late. Clearly, these articles would make readers feeling that all the problems of stringent deadlines had been imposed by mediclaim insurers would be solved. But if you made a late filing of your claim, you would do so at your own risk.
Some insurance companies had been stringent about claims filing, hospitalization intimation by imposing unrealistic deadlines. These ‘tight’ norms had been formulated under the garb of protection against mediclaim ‘fraud’. On the other hand, insurers had no any deadline for payment of claims. The customer was the one who would get hit by such a one-sided contract. Every year for decades, genuine customers who had been paying premiums consistently would have been at the receiving end with outright claims rejection.