Nineteen years ago, tragedy struck when I lost my husband in a car accident that also caused a severe injury on my spine. It took a year to recover from the injury, and within three years, I lost all my family members except my mother. Almost overnight, I found myself raising a one-year-old and a three-year-old on my own.

Ten years after the accident, in 2015, I was diagnosed with cancer. Within a month of my diagnosis, I underwent surgery and chemotherapy. Six months later, I was completely healed, and the doctors haven’t found any cancer cells since. I also underwent a PET scan this month and was found free from the disease.

The cancer treatment I underwent earlier was covered by the company my husband and I had worked for, as we had a corporate medical policy. However, after I quit my job to become self-employed and take care of my children, I needed personal medical insurance.

To my shock, no insurance company would offer me coverage because of my history of a critical illness. After a year of searching, I discovered that there is only one company that offered health insurance to people like me, but the premiums were extremely high, the coverage was minimal, and they wouldn’t cover anything related to my previous illness or offer a no-claim bonus.

If one were to talk about government hospitals, the situation is no better. A senior neurosurgeon at a government hospital in Mumbai had prescribed an MRI scan and a full-body PET scan for me recently. However, the hospital informed me that the next available MRI slot was a month and a half away, and the earliest PET scan at another hospital, which was a government facility, was a year later. What is a patient supposed to do in such circumstances? Are we expected to suffer or even die while waiting for treatment?

In private hospitals, both tests would have cost me around Rs 40,000—Rs 11,000 for the MRI and Rs 28,000 for the PET scan. I would have had to pay out of my pocket since health insurance companies refuse to offer me coverage.

After going through what I went through, I have a few questions for the health ministry:

1. Why is someone who has suffered a critical illness be ineligible for health insurance, even if they are willing to pay the premium?
2. After battling a serious illness and draining their finances, why are they forced to pay much higher premiums than others? Is this a penalty for surviving a terminal disease?
3. Why won’t insurance companies cover the same disease if it reoccurs? In my case, when I had cancer the first time, the insurance company didn’t bear the cost, so what is their objection to covering it in the future? They’re willing to cover critical illnesses for new claimants, so why not for survivors
4. Isn’t the health of those who have already fought through a critical illness equally precious?
5. Why doesn’t the government, particularly the health ministry, do more to protect those who have already suffered and direct the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) to revise their rules to offer fair coverage for such individuals?

There is no telling how many patients are suffering in silence, deprived of government protection in this critical area of life. Don’t they deserve better?

END OF ARTICLE