New Delhi, April 11: With diabetes affecting over 10 crore of the Indian population, metropolises like Mumbai and Delhi national capital region lead in the maximum number of diabetes-related health insurance claims in the country according to a survey.
As much as 7.8 per cent of the 131 crore people in the country are diabetic with the disease having claimed over two lakh lives till now, according to World Health Organisation (WHO), which focused on diabetes for this year’s World Health Day on April 7. “Diabetes rarely makes headlines, and yet it will be the world’s seventh largest killer by 2030 unless intense and focused efforts are made by governments, communities and individuals,” says Poonam Khetrapal Singh, regional director of WHO South-East Asia.
Diabetes, a chronic disease that occurs either when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or when the body cannot effectively use the insulin it produces, has often been considered to be a lifestyle disorder, with the affluent urban population being most prone to it. While a WHO report noted rise in diabetes patients in the country, a data aggregation of some of the leading private health insurance companies suggested a rise in diabetes related health claims. The data also raised concern over such claimants belonging to the age group below 25 years. Diabetes becomes serious when patients become hyperglycaemic and have to undergo costly surgeries such as diabetic retinopathy, diabetic nephropathy, and diabetic foot treatment.
A year by year data of the claims handled by the insurance firm says 4,140 senior citizens since 2011 have claimed insurance cover for diabetes while the same figure among youth till the age of 25 remained at 235. The same numbers for people in the age group of 26-45 and 46-60 stood at 1,564 and 3,433, respectively, it said. With 1,286 and 1,015, Mumbai and Delhi NCR hospitals respectively registered most such cases even as Chennai, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Vadodara and Madurai (in the same) order constituted the top 10 cities and together formed 62 per cent of total diabetes-related health insurance claims, the data said. “As compared to 2014, we have noticed a 23 per cent increase in diabetes-related claims in 2015. The average diabetic claim amount for 2014 being Rs 53,739 and Rs 60,838 in 2015.
Mumbai has reported the maximum number of claims (14 per cent) among other metros, followed by Delhi and Kolkata (both 7 per cent) and Chennai (5 per cent).
World Health Day this year focuses on diabetes and calls for scaling up efforts to prevent, care for and detect the disease to arrest the global epidemic which is hitting the low and middle-income countries the most, the WHO said. Countries in the WHO South-East Asia, including India, must take vigorous and concerted action to ‘prevent, treat and beat’ diabetes, a potentially fatal disease that has reached epidemic proportions and is expected to further increase in coming years, it said. “Diabetes is of particular concern in the region.
More than one out of every four of the 3.7 million diabetes-related deaths globally occurs in the region, while its prevalence exacerbates difficulties in the control of major infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. Almost half of the 96 million people suffering the disease don’t know they have it. If diabetes prevalence continues to rise, the personal, social and economic consequences will deepen,” she said.
