Health Insurance | How to keep your insurance beneficial

Benefits of an insurance policy are obtained if your policy is going for the long term. The earlier you buy, the cheaper will be your life insurance premium. If you buy insurance at the right time, you surely don’t want to pass the benefits by missing your premium paying deadline because of a cash crunch or failing to notice.
The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) has provided a standardized window of opportunity for people to make up for late payment. In general insurance policies, especially health insurance, benefits get added for every year in which you don’t make a claim.
For unit-linked insurance plans (Ulips) and health insurance, the rules of reviving a lapsed policy have been standardized. A policy lapses when the premiums are not paid within the deadline or within the grace period of about a month after the main deadline. Here under are the current rules regarding the health insurance.
A health insurance policy needs to be renewed every year. It is obligatory on the insurer’s part to renew your policy, irrespective of the number of claims you may have made.
Till about a couple of years back, the concept of grace period did not really exist in the health insurance sector. Insurers considered any late payment as a break in the policy and refused to renew which was a cause for concern especially for senior citizens (as it meant no health insurance at all).
In March 2009, the sectoral regulator standardized this process. It made it mandatory for the insurers to clearly state the terms and conditions of renewal, including the age up to which a policy could be renewed. Insurers were also required to give indicative premiums of future renewals. Apart from these renewal norms, Irda introduced a window of a grace period of at least 15 days. So you got another 15 days after the due date to renew your policy.
But now: Though Irda has put in place the rules, they are still not followed to the last word.
In reality some state-run insurers give only a 7-day window. However, this is more a problem of internal communication and as a customer it means approaching the higher ups like the regional office or main office for a 15-day extension. The rules of the game are in favor of the policyholder so one should take all necessary measures to keep important insurance policies from lapsing.