Claim No. 220027366P
To start with, my feeling is, Bajaj Allianz starts the process of claiming with an intention of not approving the claims.
To give a slight background about me, I don’t live in India(may be the biggest problem in this case). My in-laws live by themselves(my wife is the only daughter). They both are elderly with 80 and 69 years of age. We had to buy a health insurance for my mother-in-law in a hurry, so we bought the one which the agent told us is good. Unfortunately, that was Bajaj Allianz. I paid the insurance premium from my bank.
When I was in India(July 2022) we had to hospitalise my MIL. I called Bajaj customer service regarding the claim process. I was told that it is very easy. I had to install an app on my phone and start the claim. Everything has to be uploaded via the app, nothing to be sent physically and after the review the claim will be settled. I thought this is a great process. I did that same. Installed the app on my phone, started the claim process, filled up the claim form within the app and uploaded all the documents i.e., Lab reports, prescriptions, hospital bills, medicine bills etc via the app. Although, using that app is another nightmare, let’s not go there! I have sent a separate email to Bajaj Allianz, listing all the issues with the app.
After a day or two, I received an update from “health.admin” email id. Strange thing is, they asked me to send the same documents via email in PDF format! What kind of process is that? Asking for the same paperwork twice? I sent through all the details again. Including some KYC documents. In fact, I think I sent more documents than what I should have(regarding KYC). Since I could not send all the documents through email, I thought of uploading the documents to the cloud and send them the download link. I got a response back saying, download link is not allowed. The documents have to be sent via email. Please correct me if I am wrong, we live in a computer age, right?
Bajaj Allianz’s customer service team is stuck with certain weird requirements wherein I have sent them an equivalent document which gives them the same information but “No” they have to have what is written in their rule book! Practically I cannot send them what they are asking! And they have sent me a “Claim Form” to be filled in by the insured.
I have a question here:
If I had to fill in the form then what was the point of filling in the claim form within the app?
Practical problem for me is, it is very difficult for my in-laws to fill in the form because they are non-technical people. I can’t send them the form via email because they don’t have an email! Even if I fill in the form, I can’t get their sign because I don’t live with them.
If they want to follow such level of bureaucracy then we as potential health insurance buyer should ask for company registration documents, last 3 years accounts, all employee details, their salaries etc when your product is being sold to us.
In my view, Bajaj Allianz has got no intension of paying back when a claim comes in. All they want is our money! Which they get when we buy the policy. They let their agents(who later become non-reachable) do the dirty work of selling the policy so that Bajaj can take the money from us and later on carry on with dirty tricks and stupid bureaucracy when we try to claim a genuine medical expenses. Just create so many hurdles that the person will get fed up to continue with the claim process.
On the other hand, “Star Health Insurance” is 100 times better than Bajaj(I know for fact).