About the project

Health insurance is necessary; but who will develop it for the poor?

Like you, we are aware of the huge need to bolster health insurance in India. A growing number of private health insurers sell insurance to wealthy individuals. And the government of India is motivated to look for solutions to encourage health insurance for the poor, in pursuit of breaking the vicious cycle of poverty -> ill health -> poverty.

For the time being, most poor Indians are unable to pay the cost of healthcare to heal their illnesses, and they must rely on themselves alone when paying the direct and indirect cost of illness. In some cases, individuals can get limited help from their community, as some groups have started “micro health insurance” units, which offer rudimentary pre-payment solutions. Can micro health insurance units serve as an effective instrument in insuring the poor? The project “Strengthening Micro Health Insurance Units for the Poor in India” intends to provide new evidence-based reasoning how the stability and efficiency of schemes in place can be increased, and pave the way for the establishment of new schemes.

Reinsurance is also necessary; but who will develop it for micro health insurers?

Our work will focus on issues determining the demand for insurance among the poor (e.g. trust, preferred package design, willingness to pay, understanding of insurance principles) as well as on the supply side of microinsurance (pricing, product design, transaction costs, regulatory requirements etc.), with special emphasis on the schemes’ long term stability. Here, our project will apply to the Indian context the extensive conceptual framework formulated under the Social Re project. Social Re is based on the idea that microinsurance institutions can best serve their purpose - of meeting the health insurance needs of the poor - by breaking away from isolated operation and becoming close-to-client local outlets of a broadly based network of units pooling risks, resources and technical capacity. The institution that can organize this network, and provide technical and financial (reinsurance) support to micro health insurance units is “Social Re”.