A study on consumer buying behavior towards health Insurance in Kanpur

Let me start with few statistics. There are two deaths every minute due to heart attack. Hundreds of people die every day due to cancer. India is at 3^rd spot due to deaths of malaria. Almost 5000 children die every day due to several diseases. There are approximately 500 road accident deaths in India every day. Out of this approximately 200 are dying because of lack of medical facility or lack of treatment. What else we need to realize that we need health insurance?

It takes only one visit to a hospital to make us realize how vulnerable we are, every passing second. For the rich as well as poor, male as well as female and young as well as old, being diagnosed with an illness and having the need to be hospitalized can be a hard trial. Heart problems, diabetes, stroke, renal failure, cancer – the list of lifestyle diseases just seem to get longer and more common these days. Thankfully availability of specialty hospitals and specialist doctors has increased over a period of time, but all that comes at higher cost. The super-rich can afford such costs, but what about an average middle class person. For an illness that requires hospitalization/surgery, costs can easily run into five digit bills. A Health insurance policy can cover such expenses to a large extent.

Health insurance is rising rapidly as an important instrument to fund health care needs of the people. This research paper is based on the area of awareness and purchase behavior of people towards health insurance. Relationship between certain factors will be analyzed such as awareness towards health insurance and purchase behavior, Gender, age and income level. Research is also based on to find out preference of respondents towards type of health insurance. This study is also focused on to identify the various barriers in the subscription of health Insurance