The increase in claim settlements in 2021 specifies a better awareness of Health insurance services & products after the outbreak of the Corona pandemic. Digit Insurance has released an assessment of health insurance claim trends, which shows that the number of claims increased by more than 3.5 times in 2021.

The study is based on statistics of resolved claims by Digit for their commercial retail and institutional medical products from January to December 2020 & 2021. The insurance company compared information from 2021 to 2020, to understand the overall performance. However, only those cities with 1000+ claims were included in the study.

The “Delta” variant which is also commonly referred to as ‘the second wave’, lead to more hospitalizations in India as compared to the perils caused by the first pandemic wave in 2020. This led to a surge in health claims by nearly 257% in 2021 as compared to the year 2020.

In 2020, both metropolitan & non-metropolitan areas had a similar number of Corona claims. However, there was quite a change of trend in 2021. As per this new trend, non-metropolitan areas reported a surge in claims by 17% more than metropolitan cities.

This trend led to a wakeup call among both the metropolitan and non-metropolitan population. People started understanding that they can contract Covid-19 anytime and may require health insurance immediately. They started becoming aware about the fact that once they become Covid positive, they won’t receive health insurance with Covid-19 cover. This led to a quicker acceptance of health insurance even in smaller towns.

Key Highlights:

A).  Overall health claims increased by 257% (3.5 times) in 2021 compared to 2020.

B).  Covid19 claims also increased by 178% due to the attack of the Delta variant.

C).  Metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas are shown a similar number of Covid claims in 2020; however, this number of claims increased by 17% in non-metropolitan cities in 2021.

D).  Also in terms of the whole number of claims, non-metropolitan areas mentioned a 51% higher number of claims than metropolitan cities in 2021.

E).  Also, the claim percentage further increased to nearly 300% in non-metropolitan areas the same year.

F).  However, average claim size for the year 2021 fell down by more than 21% in comparison to 2020.

G).  Tamil Nadu, Gujrat, Karnataka, Maharashtra & Telangana as per reports, had the highest* nos. of overall claim sizes in the year 2021.

H).  As per reports, people between 25-35 yrs. & 36-45 yrs. had the maximum nos. of claims in the year 2021. This was a similar trend observed in 2020.

I).  The study by Digit reveals that men had 127% more claims as compared to women in the year 2021. In 2020, the same was at 283%.