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Medical Insurance Coverage Widening
Medical insurance has been a fairly small field in the past, with
just a few companies operating or represented in Cambodia and
serving for the most part foreigners working here, but demand for
coverage is growing, both for expats and for local people.
Market leader is Indochine Insurance, a brokerage that offers a full
range of insurance services from a number of providers, most of them
European. Indochine also has links to the legendary reinsurance
corporation Lloyds of London, as well as a variety of other
organizations.
Indochine, which has been in Cambodia since 1994, offers medical
insurance chiefly through the Goodhealth corporation. This is a
British company with Asian operations managed through its claims
center in Hong Kong. Goodhealth’s reinsurer is Lloyd’s of
London.
They also write policies for the Journeyman group, a British company
that is reinsured through the Dutch-owned Gouda Group. Journeyman
can offer short-term policies of as brief as three months.
A new feature at Indochine is the Cambodian Health Insurance
Plan—CHIP. This is an improvement on the basic workers’
compensation coverage that has been available for some time, as it
covers conditions not related to employment.
CHIP only pays for inpatient care, so it functions as insurance for
serious health problems, but it satisfies the demand from foreign
organizations to extend coverage to Cambodian employees as well as
expats.
Both Goodhealth and Journeyman coverages are structured with various
levels of coverage and fees range accordingly. A popular feature is
the medical evacuation treatment that ensures a seriously ill person
will be taken to Singapore or Thailand for appropriate treatment.
Other policies are focused on returning a sick member to his or her
home country for treatment.
While Indochine’s customers are mostly Westerners, Asia Insurance
(Cambodia) Ltd’s policyholders are almost all Chinese. About 70
percent of the organizations holding Asia Insurance policies own
garment factories and the remainder are drawn from a variety of
NGOs.
Asia Insurance, which came to Cambodia in 1997, is 50-percent owned
by Bangkok Insurance of Thailand. The Asia Insurance Group is based
in Hong Kong and has branches in China, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the USA.
General Manager Piphat Tongpatanakul is able to speak with clients
in Mandarin, Teochieu dialect, Thai or English. He stresses that an
important feature he is able to offer policyholders is that his
office is their claims center. “We check the claims right here and
give people either cash or a check right away,” he says. “It is
very convenient for our clients.”
Although he acknowledges that there are many skilled practitioners
in Phnom Penh, Piphat says it is almost always cheaper for people to
travel to Bangkok for treatment. “If I need medical treatment and
I am capable of walking to the plane, that is what I would do,” he
laughs.
“Bangkok hospitals have excellent care, are very clean and are
significantly cheaper than facilities in Phnom Penh, so it is almost
always worth the air fare to go to Thailand for treatment.”
—Elizabeth Wright
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