Sunday, April 06, 2025
An estimated 70 million Indians get pushed into poverty by taking care of their family’s medical expenses. To solve the problem of affordability, Tejbir Singh and Hemal Bhatt came with an innovative solution. Read more to find out their solution. 
Have you ever wondered how expensive India’s healthcare is? An estimated 70 million Indians get pushed into poverty by taking care of their family’s medical expenses. Annually a battle is fought between meeting the daily needs of the family and saving the life of a family member.
Indians spend 86% of all medical bills from their own pocket. The problem is hugely caused by not having health insurance. A mere 28.7% of Indians have health insurance. On average 20% of income is utilised to cover the health costs of many Indian families.
To solve the problem of affordability that plagues many low and middle-income households, Tejbir Singh and Hemal Bhatt came with an innovative solution. They created a finance saving platform meant to make saving easier. So in 2016, Affordplan was started. This venture creates a parallel financing option for healthcare. They help patients plan, save and then pay for future unexpected medical expenses, like knee surgeries, pregnancy and more.
They have tailor-made solutions for households with an annual income between 2 to 10 lakhs. This opens up the window for 300 million families to not only afford healthcare but afford good healthcare. It also takes care of small and medium-sized hospitals by giving them zero credit risk. Many a time such hospitals had to tell the patients to leave due to insufficient funds. This would decrease their patient count by 40-60%. Now, these hospitals could enter many more patients.
In 2016, AffordPlan received its initial funds of $500 thousand. Later Prime Venture Partners raised ₹200 million. In 2018, Lok Capital and Omidyar Network raised ₹558 million. Last year, AffordPlan partnered with YES BANK to launch Swasth Card. The motive behind the card was to help families save their hard-earned money for future medical emergencies. YES BANK has also made it available as a wallet QR scan for merchant partners available on the AffordPlan Swasth app.
Do you think AffordPlan is the solution to healthcare problems of affordability? Affordability along with accessibility and availability are the three things that plague India’s healthcare sector. Will AffordPlan be able to help millions of Indians get in the crucial habit of saving for emergencies?
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