Health insurance premiums are predominantly decided based on your age and sum assured opted. The premium amount changes and increases with your age, irrespective of whether you have made any claims or not. No claim bonus is a benefit which you get if there have been no claims in the previous policy/policies. As a common practice this is an incentive for claim free renewals and does not have any impact on premium, it typically enhances sum insured by a percentage every year. In case of your policy and the premium increase, you can take a clarity from your insurance provider to understand reason for increase. Often, it is due to change in age slabs as defined by the insurer.
Health policies cover hospitalisation expenses including pre-hospitalisation and post-hospitalisation expenses as per your policy terms and conditions. However, there are certain non-medical expenses incurred during hospitalisation which are not covered under health policies and the list of the same has been given by Irdai. During cashless procedure, some hospitals have the practice of collecting deposit to take care of such expenses. Once the cashless claim is settled by the insurance company, the hospital calculates the payable expenses by the insured and settles the refund amount with the insured. In case of reimbursement claims, IrdaiI has set a time limit of 30 days to pay the admissible claims registered with the insurer, this period starts after submission of complete set of documents to your insurance company.
You can claim for damages to your stolen and recovered car. Once the vehicle is recovered, you need to take the legal possession of the vehicle and inform RTO and police about its recovery. You also need to give a recovery intimation of your vehicle to the insurance company. Insurer will do a physical inspection of your vehicle, assess the damage and accordingly settle the claim. In case, the theft of the vehicle was not intimated to the insurer earlier, you need to report the claim with copy of FIR registered with police for stolen vehicle.
The second aspect related to this picture is whether you can claim the vehicle after the insurance company has settled your theft claim and post this the vehicle is recovered/found. As per the subrogation rule, insurance company has the legal possession of your vehicle after they have settled your theft claim and the company can sell it to prospective buyers through bidding. In case you wish to buy back the vehicle, you can repay the entire theft claim amount to insurer and get the possession from them.
The writer is MD & CEO, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance
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