Agents push health insurance portability for commission, not customer benefit. Mint reports switches disguised as new policies, hidden waiting periods, and zero transparency on rejected claims.
Alpha Score of 59 reflects moderate overall profile with strong momentum, poor value, strong quality, moderate sentiment.
Health insurance portability lets you switch insurers without losing credit for waiting periods already served or your accumulated no-claim bonus. Buy a new policy from scratch and those benefits vanish; waiting periods reset, past coverage disappears. The regulator IRDAI introduced portability years ago to stop customers from feeling trapped with poor service or unfair pricing.
In theory it sounds simple. In practice, serious problems have surfaced.
Reporting by Mint Money found two major issues. The first involves how agents actually use portability. Some treat it as a commission opportunity, pushing customers to switch insurers even when they do not need to. Agents are sometimes paid to move clients between carriers. This is against the rules but still happens, Mint reported. Switching itself is not wrong when a customer genuinely wants better cover. The problem arises when agents push switches for personal profit.
Industry data shows roughly one in four customers do not renew the most popular health insurance plans on the market. It is not clear if they switched insurers or dropped cover entirely. Insurers believe many of these customers switched through portability, Mint said. If agents are pushing switches for commission, that raises real concerns.
Some agents go further. They sell an entirely new policy and present it to the customer as if it were a port. The customer often does not notice the trick until they file a claim. By then, they may have lost old benefits completely and face unexpected waiting periods.
The second big problem is a lack of transparency. Even 15 years after IRDAI introduced portability, the regulator does not share enough information. Insurers do not publicly disclose how many policies are ported each year. There is no way to check whether rules are being followed properly.
All porting requests should go through one central system. This allows the new insurer to see your past claims history. The system is meant to protect you when you switch. But there is no data on claims rejected after porting. Nobody really knows how often that causes problems for customers.
Questions arise if your new insurer rejects a claim based on old information. That information should already have been shared among insurers. If it was not, someone failed to do their job properly.
Right now, portability seems fine as long as everything goes smoothly. The real problems only appear once you file a claim. Without better transparency, these issues will likely continue, Mint reported. Experts say clearer rules and public data could fix the gap.
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Drafted by a large language model from the source reporting linked above, then screened by automated publishing checks. It is not read by a journalist before publication. Some articles cite our Alpha Score. Verify prices and figures against the original source. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.