Take care of your health

Aman Kaushal, 35, is a troubled man these days. Till recently he worked with an IT company in Noida. But suddenly one day, his boss told him that as outsourcing slowed down significantly due to slowdown in the US, the company was forced to cut down on staff and Aman was one of them.

Another setback was awaiting him. Since he and his family were covered by his company under a group health insurance policy, Aman never bothered to buy a personal health policy. Few days back, his wife met with an accident and had to be hospitalised for a week for a minor surgery. He was shocked to see the hospital bill after his wife's discharge. It was a whopping R four lakh bill. Aman had to use his entire EPF corpus earned in the last seven years of job. This double whammy has put Aman into a depression.

He 'failed' to plan

There's an old saying, "failing to plan is planning to fail." While Aman put the entire blame of both losing his job and not having a health insurance cover on his "bad luck," his is a classic case of failing to plan. If you look around and ask a question to your relatives and colleagues in office, you will be surprised to know that there might not be many who have taken this simple but wise step of buying a personal health insurance policy over and above what the employer has provided.

"In India, the estimate of the number of employees who also opt for personal health insurance, would be less than 3 per cent overall with a majority of them doing so to avail of the associated tax benefits," says KK Mishra, executive vice president, Tata AIG General Insurance.

Whether you are in a job or are an entrepreneur, there is an overall economic ecosystem within which you work. The economy in India is going through a tough phase with clear signals of a slowdown. While the reasons, ramifications and results of this slowdown can be debated by experts, those in job have already started feeling the heat regardless of the sector they belong to.

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