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Standalone health insurance company, Star Health and Allied Insurance Company, today announced that it has tweaked its family health product so as to offer a bouquet of new benefits to customers.
The Family Health Optima product has been tweaked so that if the sum insured is exhausted, 50 per cent of the sum insured will automatically get replenished and can be availed of for illnesses other than those for which the policy was used. This facility is however available to sum insured of Rs 3 lakh onwards.
Alongside, the company has increased the number of day-care procedures from 12 to 101 and has also increased the ‘room rent' allowed in various categories of cities and towns. In major cities, the ‘room rent' has been raised from Rs 1,500 to Rs 5,000 a day, the company's Chairman and Managing Director, Mr V Jagannathan, said during a press conference here today.
Premium income
Star Health has earned premium income of Rs 840 crore up to December this financial year and expects to end the full year with a premium income of Rs 1,200 crore. This is roughly the same as last year, but in the current year, the company lost the accounts of two State Governments — Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.
Mr Jagannathan said that the company would take a small hit in the profits because of the loss of these accounts. In the case of Tamil Nadu, the Government's welfare portfolio was given to United India Insurance because the public sector company quoted a lower premium.
Yet, because the ‘market premium' would increase from around Rs 300 crore last year to about Rs 500 crore this year, Star Health would be able to keep its topline up.
Report loss
However, because of certain provisioning requirements, the company would report a loss in the current year. Mr Jagannathan stressed that the loss would be only on account of provisioning requirements, but Star Health is profitable on its operations, because the claims to premium ratio is less than 70 per cent.
He reckons that the company's promoters would need to bring in a further sum of Rs 120 crore in 2012, to support the growing operations. Star Health, promoted by Dubai-based businessmen, is part owned by Sequoia Capital and ICICI Ventures (47 per cent) and Oman Insurance (10 per cent).
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