Why NRIs are re-evaluating health insurance for parents in India

There is a phone call that many NRIs dread more than any other. Not the one about a job, or a visa, or a market correction. The one that comes late at night, from a sibling or a neighbour, saying that a parent has been taken to hospital. What follows that call is not just grief or worry. It is a rapid, disorienting scramble to book a flight, to reach someone at the hospital, and somewhere in all of it, to figure out whether there is insurance, whether the hospital accepts it, and whether anyone on the ground actually knows how to use it.

For a growing number of NRIs, this scramble is prompting a quiet but significant shift: a hard look at whether the health coverage their parents have, if they have any at all, is genuinely adequate for the medical realities of aging in India today.

The Medical Inflation Problem Nobody Talks About Enough

India's healthcare costs have been rising sharply for years, consistently outpacing general inflation. What this means in practice is that procedures which felt manageable a decade ago have become genuinely expensive for middle-class families.


A major cardiac surgery at a reputed private hospital today can cost between ₹12 and ₹15 lakh. Cancer treatment diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation can stretch well beyond ₹20 lakh depending on the stage and facility. Prolonged ICU stays, even without a specific procedure, can accumulate costs of ₹30,000 to ₹80,000 per day at top-tier hospitals.

These are not worst-case numbers. They are increasingly routine ones. And they are the backdrop against which many NRI families are discovering that a health policy taken out five or eight years ago perhaps with a sum insured of ₹3 or ₹5 lakh is no longer meaningfully protective.

Why Parents Often End Up Underinsured

The gap between what parents have and what they need is rarely the result of neglect. It is usually the result of timing and inertia. Many NRI families secured basic health cover for parents years ago, when it felt sufficient and when premiums were lower. As parents aged, renewing the same policy became the default; it was simpler, and switching insurers often meant losing continuity benefits or facing fresh waiting periods. What did not keep pace was the sum insured.

A policy that once covered most emergencies now covers perhaps a third of a serious hospitalisation. And yet, because the policy exists, the family feels covered. The psychological comfort of having any insurance can obscure the practical inadequacy of what that insurance actually provides.

There is also the issue of exclusions. Many older health policies carry waiting periods for pre-existing conditions, sub-limits on specific procedures, or room rent caps that dramatically reduce effective coverage. A parent with a cardiac history may find that the very procedure they are most likely to need falls under a waiting period or a restricted benefit.

What Senior Citizen Plans Actually Offer

The Indian insurance market has evolved considerably in recent years. Senior citizen health plans today are meaningfully different from what was available a decade ago, and many NRIs are unaware of how much the landscape has changed. Purpose-built senior citizen plans now offer higher sum insured options commonly between ₹5 lakh and ₹25 lakh with features specifically designed for older policyholders.

These include coverage for day-care procedures that do not require overnight admission, domiciliary hospitalisation for conditions treated at home, and annual health check-ups as a built-in benefit.

Critically, many plans now cover AYUSH treatments Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy which are often preferred by older patients. Some plans include teleconsultation benefits, which have become particularly relevant for NRI families managing a parent's ongoing care from abroad.

Top-up and super top-up plans are another tool worth understanding. Rather than replacing an existing policy, these plans activate once a base threshold is crossed making them a cost-effective way to extend effective coverage without bearing the full premium of a high-sum standalone policy. For parents already holding a basic plan, a super top-up can dramatically increase real protection at a fraction of the cost of upgrading the base cover.

The Specific Challenge of Managing This From Abroad

For NRIs, health insurance for parents is not purely a financial question. It carries an emotional weight that is difficult to describe to someone who has not experienced it. When a parent is hospitalized and you are thousands of kilometres away, the feeling of helplessness is acute. What reduces that helplessness is not simply knowing that insurance exists, it is knowing that the insurance will work without requiring your real-time involvement.

That there is a cashless facility at the hospital they have been taken to. That a family member on the ground knows the policy number, the insurer's helpline, and the pre-authorisation process. That the claim will not be rejected on a technicality nobody anticipated.

This is why the choice of insurer matters as much as the choice of plan. Network hospital coverage in the relevant city, claim settlement ratios, the responsiveness of the insurer's support during hospitalisation these are not secondary considerations. For a family managing a medical emergency remotely, they can be the difference between a stressful situation and an unmanageable one.

It is also worth considering a health management service or a local coordination arrangement of someone trusted who can physically be present at the hospital, liaise with doctors, and handle the administrative process while the NRI manages things from a distance. Insurance covers the financial exposure. It does not replace human presence.

The Right Time to Review Is Before It Is Urgent

The practical difficulty with senior citizen health insurance is that it becomes harder to obtain as parents age and accumulate health conditions. Insurers apply higher premiums, stricter underwriting, and more exclusions as the risk profile increases. A parent who is relatively healthy at 65 will generally access better terms than the same parent at 72, after a cardiac event or a diabetes diagnosis.

This creates a window that many NRI families do not act on until it has narrowed considerably. The right moment to review and upgrade parental health cover is not when a diagnosis has been made or a hospitalisation has occurred. It is when parents are stable, ambulatory, and the decision can be made thoughtfully rather than urgently.

A structured review should include the current sum insured versus realistic treatment costs in the city where parents live, the specific exclusions and waiting periods in the existing policy, the insurer's hospital network in that location, and whether a top-up plan or a fresh senior citizen policy would better close the gap.

For NRIs who have not reviewed their parents' health cover in the last two to three years, that review is overdue. The costs of inadequate cover, when a serious illness arrives, are measured not just in money but in the particular anguish of being far away and unable to do enough.

(The author is CEO, BajajCapital Insurance Broking Ltd.)