Even Healthcare offers 50 cent Indian basic insurance

Thanks to a smart app, the Indian company Even Healthcare has succeeded in offering limited health insurance in India for € 0.50 per month. What can the Netherlands learn from this?

Poor Indians are also insured thanks to Even Healthcare

While more and more of India’s 1.4 billion people are emerging from poverty, hundreds of millions still live below the subsistence level. Getting sick is then a huge catastrophe, and health insurance is unaffordable. Those who are not strong must be smart and through a smart construction, Even Healthcare succeeds in ensuring basic care for these poorest people as well.

Insurance from €0.50-€6 per month

The very cheapest package, which costs 40 Indian rupees (€ 0.50 per month), only covers a doctor visit and a care team. A slightly more luxurious package costing 320 Indian rupees, around €4 per month, also offers free tests. The most comprehensive package, of 528 Indian rupees, offers coverage that is somewhat comparable to the Dutch basic package: covid-19 related services, free hospital care and emergency assistance throughout India.

Low rates Even Healthcare thanks to smart prevention

Even for Indian standards, these amounts are very low. Even Healthcare achieves this by placing a strong emphasis on prevention. As soon as someone joins the insurance policy, he or she is immediately tested.

For example, if they discover that a patient has diabetes or is overweight, they will receive lifestyle advice and a treatment plan. This prevents a lot of medical costs. Because diabetes leads to many ailments, the treatment of which is very expensive.

Furthermore, Even Healthcare does not have an expensive bureaucratic organization, but an app through which you can request tests and communicate with doctors and the treatment team. In short: they spend all their money on providing medical care and prevention.

Dutch healthcare can be smarter

The costs for medical treatment in the Netherlands are skyrocketing. To a large extent, the bureaucracy and meeting culture can drive those nurses and carers to despair. Market forces also offer all kinds of perverse incentives. The healthcare system earns more from chronically ill patients than from curing the disease. The exorbitant rates that pharmaceutical companies charge for medicines in the Netherlands also contribute to the increasingly unaffordable healthcare.

Dutch health insurers can learn a lot from the smart way in which Even Healthcare approaches this. As a result, the Dutch stay healthy for longer. Hopefully there will soon be such a company in the Netherlands. This is also a great project to roll out in countries to which the Netherlands provides development aid. With that we can solve a lot of human suffering.