There have been numerous cases in the past where patients have complained that hospitals have been lax in handing over their medical records to them. Hospitals have used this delay as a deterring factor if the patient wants to move to another hospital. In cases where there is a dispute between the patient and the hospital, the patient typically feels that the hospital also uses such delays to get the time to doctor the records. In order to provide the patient with their complete set of medical records fast, the National Consumer Court passed a directive that henceforth hospitals will have to provide either the patient or the authorized representative of the patient, their complete medical records within 72 hours of receiving a request for such records. This judgment is bound to provide relief to patients who would otherwise struggle with trying to get such records from the hospital:

MUMBAI: In a landmark order, the national consumer disputes redressal commission has made it mandatory for all medical practitioners and hospitals across the country to provide the entire medical records of a patient to him\her or the authorised nominee or legal authorities concerned within 72 hours of the demand.
Simultaneously, the commission asked the Medical Council of India to promulgate a comprehensive notification. Accordingly, a week ago, the MCI directed medical practitioners and hospitals to provide the medical records of a patient within three days of the request. “In any set of circumstances, hospitals\medical practitioners shall hand over the medical records of the patient to him or his relatives within 72 hours,” the MCI said in its circular.

This is an excellent judgment, and will go a long way in making sure that the relationship between the doctor and the patient remains smooth, and does not clouded with extraneous factors. Once the patient realizes that the records are easily available and that the hospital is duty bound to provide them, they will start asserting their rights and no longer be fearful that the hospital will try to delay things if they want to change hospitals.

When a person is considering taking insurance, one always comes across various riders that one can add to the insurance policy. After all, who would not get attracted to the additional safety of adding on some accident benefits to a life policy, and many other riders to a health policy. What I do know is that the insurance agent is not very helpful with regard to explaining the benefit of riders, and most people are not very well informed when it comes to understand what riders are, and whether it makes sense to add a rider or not. So, here is an article that seeks to explain what riders are, and what their benefits are:

A policy rider in an insurance policy is a provision or modification to an existing insurance policy that provides additional coverage. Generally, policy riders are sold separately from insurance policies. Riders on the insurance contract provide additional protection against risk. You can buy a basic insurance policy and add riders to it to include extra protection. This additional protection may include accidental death cover, disability cover, critical illness cover, hospitalisation benefits, or loss of employment cover. The riders provide low-cost pure risk cover to the insured. These need to be bought specifically along with the base policy at the time of inception of the policy. The insured cannot keep adding riders through the tenure of the policy. The policyholders should avoid those riders to the policy which are least useful to them and include those which may be critically important to their needs. One needs to choose the riders that are suited to one’s specific needs.
One needs to pay an additional charge i.e. premium, towards rider coverage. These additional charges are normally lower than the individual policies that provide the same benefits. In case the event that has been insured against through the coverage occurs, the insured or his beneficiaries would be paid the rider benefits.
Riders, if selected properly, based on one’s insurance needs can add value to the life cover of the insured. For example, a person who already has an existing accident insurance policy for Rs 20 lakhs and has no liability may not need to include the accident death benefit with his policy. However, if he is inadequately covered for life insurance and is financially incapable of taking a larger cover, he may opt for the accident death benefit. This is so because the accident death benefit rider will cost much less than the additional cover required and will provide additional monetary protection to his survivors in case of his unfortunate accidental death.

Do research before taking on the rider, since they increase the overall cost of the insurance policy. In addition, some of the riders may not be very useful or have very low likelihood of occurring, and it makes sense to evaluate as to whether the rider is useful or not.

The rise of interest rates has been a steady factor for the last couple of years. There was a time just a few years back when it seemed that interest rates would reach historically low levels, and banks had started offering housing interest rates at levels as low as 7.25%. For people looking to buy their own homes, these seemed to be very low levels of interest, and seemed sustainable. Further, most economists and experts predicted that India had entered the era of low interest rates (like in the developed countries), and hence there was a low chance that interest rates would go up in the future. However, like most prophecies, this one also came down, and interest rates have climbed ever since then. People who had taken home loans then would now have to pay very high rates of interest, and their EMI levels have also climbed much higher since them. In this era, I came across this article in the Economic Times that seeks to give some tips on what to do in such a situation:

Make no mistake. If you’re also lost in the maze of interest calculation, here are some tips which can help you to manage your loan payment effectively.
- Communicate and re-negotiate: If you’ve been a good customer, then there is always a possibility that you can negotiate with your bank on your home loan term period and the interest rate. Explains Amit Suri, CEO, AUM Financial Planners: “The interest rate that any housing finance company (HFC) charges to you is around 2-3% less than the PLR. In India, this benchmark for every bank is different. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every time there’s a hike in PLR, your interest rate will go up. If you’ve been regular with your payments, you can explore this with your bank.”
- Transfer the balance: If your HFC is not offering you any better option, you can always look at various other home loan schemes. With rising competition among the HFCs, you can use your good payment record to your advantage and do a balance transfer (BT), wherein the unpaid portion of your home loan is transferred to a new HFC at a lesser interest rate. This, however, depends on your personal liquidity position and other mid-term and long term requirements.
- Increase the tenure: If the present inflationary trend, now compounded with an increase in interest rate, has put you in a cash-flow crunch, you can increase the tenure of your home loan. If you’re at the early or mid-stage of your home loan tenure, you can exercise this option. This is advantageous for those who’re on a floating rate because as and when there is a decrease in interest rates, you can re-set your options and for the time being ease out of this pressure.
- Delay tactics: Personal finance experts feel that if you’re currently seeking a home loan, you should wait for some time. The current real estate market is on the verge of a recession and the property rates are likely to cool down in the absence of an increase in supply and lack-lustre demand. Also, real estate, particularly in metro centres, is over-priced. The other thing is the rate of interest for home loan.
- See whether you can pre-pay part or whole: When the interest rate was 7.5%, it was low and you would not consider pre-payment. However, as the interest rate rises, the cost increases and it makes sense to see whether you have funds to pre-pay the whole or significant portions of your outstanding loans (subject to pre-payment charges).

In short, nobody can right now predict what home loans will do in the future, so it makes sense to evaluate all the options that you have and exercise the ones that will lead you even to some small benefit.

Today’s world is a world of speed. If you remember previous times, in case of a medical problem, you would go to a hospital and give your samples over there for check-up; and you would get your results later (maybe the next day, but mostly after a few days). However, as medical science improved, the area of providing quality medical diagnosis based on samples (blood, fluids, stool, etc) improved, with results coming in much faster than previously. In addition, modern collection companies such as Dr. Lal Pathlabs, and the Ranbaxy SRL Labs are now spread all over major cities, decentralizing the collection facilities by spreading them ever few kilometers, with the quality of results of these tests also being of good quality. However, as the incidence of testing by specialist sample testing companies grows, our dependence on them also grows, and they increasing start entering the realm of consumer complaints and dissatisfaction:

NEW DELHI: The state consumer commission has pulled up a speciality laboratory for inordinate delay in sending a patient’s report to a hospital, as a result of which he died. The lab report for a CMV test — carried out for viral detection — was crucial for the treatment of a 56-year-old patient, who was awaiting a renal transplantation. It took the laboratory 25 days to send the report, by which time the patient died. Now, the commission has asked the lab, Speciality Ranbaxy Limited, to pay Rs 50,000 as compensation to the victim’s family.

Once companies enter life-critical areas, then they need to be clear that they can literally be responsible for life and death decisions; and accordingly need to be prepared for adverse customer reactions if their responses are not upto the desired quality levels.

Citizens of the country have mostly bad thoughts about interacting with Government bodies; a lot of them come across officialdom who are not responsive and caring about their needs (as an example, making them come repeatedly even for small errors in the red tape process), and so on. There are babus (officials), who are friendly, but most are like hard faced officials, unwilling to come across as caring people. It would be nice for people to live in a gated community (and self-sufficient place) where one would not have to interact with the Government bureaucracy, but that is living in an ideal world. However, there are cases when official responses are such that you would be horrified to read about such cases, and wonder as to how the official structure of the country could be so insensitive to the problems faced by citizens, that too when the situation is due to a fault of the agency themselves. The Delhi Development Authority however has been roundly criticized from time to time over its openness, caring nature (lack of it), and inability to care about what citizens go through. Read this article for more information:

Wondering if DDA derives “some kind of sadistic pleasure” in harassing citizens, Delhi High Court has slammed the civic agency in a case of double allotment of a flat in 1991 due to which the rightful owner was deprived of its possession and had to wage a 17 year legal battle in court.
“Ignoring dictum of law the officials of DDA keep perpetuating their illegal acts giving an impression as if they derive some kind of sadistic pleasure to harass the citizens,” HC observed while castigating the civic body for having the nerve to demand double the price of a flat which wasn’t handed over to Gandhi in 1991 because of DDA’s double allotment mistake.

This case really highlights as to how uncaring an agency can be. DDA double-allotted a flat in 1991, and when the lady in question tried to get the mistake corrected, the DDA did a fresh allotment to her after 10 years and charged her new prices, at double the original cost. In such cases, the Court should also assign individual responsibility and fine officials responsible (including fining officials of the rank of Chairman and Vice-Chairman if they had made such recommendations).