Author: Dvara Research

Insurance companies should align their sales practices to generate the best outcomes for low income households by ensuring easy access to a variety of products with disclosures that provide accurate information.

Managed competition is a theoretical concept for designing and regulating health insurance systems. Such systems can secure consumers’ interests by managing diverging incentives, instituting uniform regulations, equipping consumers to make informed choices, and creating a competitive environment tailored to rewarding those organisations that improve services to consumers.

Analysing the contents of the Reserve Bank of India’s biannual FSRs and the methodology of the RBI’s supervisory stress tests reveals that there is scope for improvement, specifically regarding the continuity in the tracking of certain risk drivers, the extent of commentary on the information, and aspects of stress tests.

This research brief aims to synthesize existing evidence on the performance of PMJJBY and PMSBY since their inception, the reasons for low participation in these schemes, and the barriers to their successful implementation.

When viewed from a consumer’s perspective, these challenges manifest at different stages of their journey with a health insurance program, beginning from the decision to enrol in a program and ending at the renewal stage. While tweaks to the design of the health insurance program or moving to a more integrated model of healthcare provision may help in this blog post, we explore the role that social capital can play in circumventing some of these challenges.

This post presents design elements that providers can use to make the consent artefacts more effective for constrained users. These design recommendations emerge from the insights from an immersive behavioural field study we conducted with 60 constrained customers through a gamified simulation of an AA transaction.

This blog post summarises key takeaways from a virtual workshop we recently hosted. It was conducted against the backdrop of a study that we recently concluded titled “Can information disclosures influence life insurance purchase decisions for low-income households?”.

Large gaps exist in life insurance coverage in India. The paper examines this issue through a supply-side lens by examining the two key features—the distinction between the agent and the broker model and the alignment of incentive structures with product life-cycle servicing.

Financing of health systems is an enduring concern world wide. Yazbeck and colleagues in their paper make an important point that when there is a choice between financing in which contributions from citizens take place in the form of generalised taxes versus those in which they are in the form of insurance premiums, the overwhelming evidence suggests that tax-based financing is unambiguously superior even in low- and middle-income countries. Despite the strength of their case against contributory insurance, we suggest that the path forward may be more complex than they envisage for a number of reasons.

An action project to help financial service providers detect debt distress among their borrowers and administer interventions to alleviate distress. Read the full report here.