Ceylinco Life promoting ‘Health Insurance’ countrywide this month

Twenty years of savings can be wiped out by a single medical emergency, an alarming reality in Sri Lanka that has prompted the country’s leading life insurer Ceylinco Life to dedicate June to a countrywide campaign to promote personal health insurance.

With the state health system heavily overburdened, as evidenced by a waiting list of 5,000 for cardiac surgery alone, Ceylinco Life’s campaign revolves around one thought-provoking question: “What is more important - saving 20 minutes of your time or saving 20 years of your savings?”, the company said in a media release.

The focus of the campaign is to persuade the target audience – employed or self-employed adults – to give just 20 minutes of their time during June 2020 to talk to a representative of the company about the health insurance products available, with the compelling argument that it could potentially save them as much as Rs 1.8 million – the cost of kidney transplant surgery – in the foreseeable future.

“The whole world changed in a matter of months due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Ceylinco Life’s Managing Director Thushara Ranasinghe points out. “Similarly, a single serious medical crisis can derail a person’s life and place a huge burden on the family, wiping out hard-earned savings. The current situation helps us see the danger even more clearly, making health insurance an essential element of a safety net that few Sri Lankans have.”

The designation of June 2020 as Ceylinco Life’s ‘Health Insurance Awareness Month’ is modelled on similar on-going initiatives by the Company that have delivered positive results: 11^th to 17^th February has been Ceylinco Life’s ‘Life Insurance Week’ for many years, while the month of May is designated ‘Retirement Planning Month’ every year.

This June, the company’s sales team of 4,000, present in every one of Sri Lanka’s 25 districts, is tasked with giving priority to promoting health insurance. Facts and figures support their efforts: a 2015 STEPS Non-communicable Disease (NCD) Risk Factor Survey in Sri Lanka following World Health Organization (WHO) methodology found that 7.4 per cent of the adult population had high blood sugar or were already on medication for diabetes, a quarter of the adult population had elevated cholesterol and 26 per cent had high blood pressure. Contributing to the risk factors of getting a non-communicable disease (NCD) are insufficient physical activity in both men and women, the usage of tobacco on a daily basis by a third of the male population and the consumption of alcohol on a daily basis by 35 per cent of the men in the country.