Keep Your Old Health Insurance Policies

I would like to share my experience on "how important it is to keep our old insurance policies" .

We generally throw away the expired policies (be it car, health, or property) as soon as the current year renewal is done. I am no exception. I realized the hard way how important it is to keep older policies and not throw them out.

My father has his health insurance with this well-known insurance company for over 15 years. He had to undergo some treatment last month which required hospitalization.

I had approached the Insurance Department of the hospital and submitted the current insurance policy and other required information. The hospital had sent the information to the Third Party Administrator (TPA) of the insurance company seeking pre-approval.

By God's grace, my dad is a healthy person and had never made a claim on his medical insurance for about a decade. So, I was sure that the TPA would pre-approve my dad's 'about to undergo' surgery with no issues.

To my surprise, the TPA has asked to furnish the past 10 year's policy copies. Worse, we did not have any of the previous years' policies. By then, it was friday evening and the insurance company did not work on Saturday and Sunday. My dad was scheduled to undergo the surgery on Saturday. I had to pay a large sum to the hospital before they would agree to proceed with the surgery.

I had to wait till Monday to call the insurance company. To make the long story short, it took me 10 days to obtain the older policies from the insurance company and produce that to the TPA in order to get the claims to go through.

In this process, I realized that the TPA's do not have the prior records of ALL policy holders. They have the records of only those who have had claims....

MORAL OF THE STORY: Please keep your older policies in safekeep so that you have it just in case you need it.



Thanking you,
Sincerely,
Kalyani Narayanan (CEO)
Easyinsuranceindia.com