Asia Insurance Review 8th Asia Conference On Healthcare And Health Insurance

The opportunities in the healthcare insurance industry in Asia were emphasised throughout the Conference. For example, healthcare insurance is already the largest growing sector of non-life insurance in India and this is likely to be the case throughout the Asia region.

According to various speakers, healthcare insurance opportunities have arisen as a result of government reforms (privatisation and changes in regulation), economic growth, growing populations, an emerging middle class in Asia and government focus on underprivileged classes and their (government's) social contract to provide healthcare for the masses, paucity and inadequacy of public health, increasing medical costs, increase in lifestyle diseases (particularly in China where obesity has increased substantially with the economic growth of the past decade) and current low penetration of healthcare into the poorer parts of the countries.

Globally, improvements in healthcare quality and resultant increase in life expectancy are forcing governments to increasingly focus on the underprivileged often rural classes at the expense of the emerging middle class. As a result, governments are exerting pressure on their populations to take out healthcare insurance as a way to take pressure off government's own healthcare systems.

A further growth opportunity for the healthcare insurance industry is the spending gap between increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the amount of government healthcare spend. In India for example there is likely to be a large spending gap by 2020, healthcare financed by insurance is projected to be around US$13 billion and the amount of healthcare spend not financed by insurance is projected to be around US$207 billion - a gap of some US$200 billion. This is seen as a huge opportunity for healthcare insurance to emerge as a viable mechanism to fill the funding gap. In addition, increasing GDP leads to an increase in discretionary spending by the middle classes who are increasingly spending their salaries on healthcare particularly in aging markets or markets with poor or scarce public health resources.

Innovation

In India there is an increased focus on how healthcare insurance can be managed. Something that was stressed throughout the conference was the requirement to innovate whether it be by developing new products, using social media to increase the exposure of healthcare insurance or developing regulation - innovation was seen as key to maximising the...