Do you feel moody or easily agitated and overwhelmed more than often?
Are you unable to relax or calm your mind?
If you have answered the question with a yes, undoubtedly stress can impact your health and health insurance.
Let us look at the nitty-gritty of stress treatment, and its coverage in India:
Stress: It’s impact and treatment
Stress can be divided into three types based on its magnitude. These types are acute stress, episodic acute stress and chronic level stress.
Depending upon its level, stress can trigger different degrees of responses in your health. For example, it can result in
- anxiety,
- digestive disorders,
- insomnia,
- cardiac and respiratory conditions,
- infertility,
- cognitive and autoimmune disorders,
- depression and more.
While the health responses mentioned above were easy to categorise, they are pretty complex to diagnose.
Furthermore, different individuals have different exposure and resistance to stress. For example, you might experience stress due to financial problems, professional challenges, personal issues and more which may or may not impact your health. These depend on your history, current concerns and future goals.
The health responses of stress, as mentioned above, can be treated according to their severity. For example, suppose you are experiencing more than an acute degree of stress. In that case, you might have to control your blood pressure, take sleeping pills or antidepressants, attend counselling sessions and more.
Therefore, stress needs to be treated early before its health responses impact your medical history. Before you understand the medical history aspect of health insurance, let us learn about the perception of the health insurance industry towards stress.
The perception of the health insurance industry towards stress
At present, there is a lack of data on the number of insured populations suffering from stress. It is because stress, in itself, is neglected by many and is, therefore, less talked about.
Therefore, there are very few standalone mental health insurance plans. You mostly have to rely on indemnity plans to cover mental health. With the new IRDAI (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India) guidelines in place, treatment expenses for mental disorders cannot be excluded.
Therefore, soon a shift in the health insurance space towards mental health can be expected.
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Can stress impact your health insurance?
The answer to this question is: not directly. Chronic stress may negatively impact your neurological, cognitive, cardiac and digestive functions.
A continued impact on them can result in complex medical conditions like anxiety, high blood pressure, depression and more. A medical history of prolonged exposure to such risk can impact your health insurance. These are perceived as health risks that may lead to further health threats.
Therefore, your health responses due to stress will be considered as pre-existing conditions while buying insurance.
While stress may not directly impact your health insurance, prolonged chronic stress can add to your list of pre-existing conditions. Your health insurance premium depends on various factors that include your medical history. Health conditions derived from prolonged chronic stress can impact your health insurance premium.
Therefore, it is better to control stress initially to avoid its impact on health and health insurance.
Read more about the Fundamentals of applying for health insurance in India.