A new Star in the health insurance segment

16 April 2007

Venkatachari Jagannathan reports on business plans of new health insurer, Star Health Allied Insurance.

Chennai: Star Health and Allied Insurance Company Limited, the only stand alone health insurer in India, the company closed 2006-07 with a premium income of Rs30 crore selling over 75,000 policies, during eight months of operations in its first year.

Apart from selling individual and group health insurance, Star Health also vends allied personal insurance policies like personal accident and overseas travel insurances. Last fiscal the company earned Rs13 crore from personal accident insurance polices and Rs1 crore from selling overseas travel insurance. The rest came from health insurance segment.

Its affable chairman and managing director V Jagannathan says, "It is challenging to be a pure-play health insurer. However it is worth it as the future potential is huge."

Getting corporates as his clients, who are bulk buyers of health and personal accident insurance policies has been a major challenge for Star Health that faces several entry issues.

All these years, non-life insurers have been dangling the loss making health insurance business for getting the more profitable corporate businesses like fire, transit and engineering insurances. And corporates feel that they would lose their leverage by opting in favour of an exclusive insurer for health insurance.