Embracing diversity: Indian firms extend health covers to LGBTQ+ employees

A small but growing set of companies in the country are recognising same-sex partners of their LGBTQ+ employees as dependants for medical/health insurance and other benefits as employee wellness, diversity & inclusion and ESG (environment, social and governance) goals are increasingly becoming crucial for organisations. 

FMCG major P&G India on Tuesday announced that all its company-offered medical and workplace benefits will be extended to partners of LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other sexual identities) employees from April 1. This includes hospitalisation coverage to LGBTQ+ employees and their dependents. 

Similarly, Tata Consumer Products announced the expansion of its group health insurance policy to cover the partners of LGBTQ employees in December 2021. Private lender Axis Bank rolled out a ‘ComeAsYouAre’ charter of policies in September 2021, allowing all employees to list their partners for mediclaim benefits irrespective of gender, sex or marital status. 

Another Tata Group company, Tata Steel, had said in 2019 that their LGBTQ employees could disclose the identity of their partners and avail of HR benefits. Conglomerate Godrej Group, hotel chain La-Lit, consultancy firm Accenture and IT services providers Cognizant and IBM as well as co-working space provider WeWork India offer medical insurance to same-sex partners of their LGBTQ employees. 

These changes have been enabled by the Supreme Court striking down a colonial-era rule of Section 377 in September 2018 to decriminalise homosexual relationships between consenting adults. 

Abhishek Poddar, co-founder and CEO of employee health insurance platform Plum, says there has been an increasing demand from companies over the past two years to include LGBTQ+ health covers. 

“Now, almost 1 in 2 companies approaching Plum proactively ask how to make their insurance policy more and more comprehensive and inclusive,” he said. More than 40 per cent of the around 1,000 companies they work with have enhanced their health insurance and benefits to make it more LGBTQ friendly. But he estimates less than 1 per cent of the total number of companies in India offer inclusive health insurance which covers LGBTQ+ benefits.  

The other side of the coin are the insurers. Generally, Poddar says, the insurance industry wants to build innovative products without adding to the claims cost. Allowing same sex partners health coverage is one of the easiest ways to make the policy more inclusive without it affecting the claims cost for insurers, he adds, because the norm anyway is to extend insurance benefits to both the employee and their spouse/dependant. 

In instances where a policy change may increase the cost impact such as including gender re-assignment surgery, they tell the organisation how much the insurance premium will go up per employee. “What we have seen is that most companies are ready to pay for it. It is true that some of the companies pass on the premium cost to employees. But in our data sets, 70 per cent of the companies don’t pass the insurance premium costs to the employees,” he pointed out. 

For instance, Axis Bank’s policy covers costs for gender affirmation processes including psychiatric costs and costs of surgical interventions. It also includes leaves for transgender and intersex employees undergoing gender affirmation surgery. 

But Poddar cautions that LGBTQ+ is only a subset of inclusion. “If you call your health insurance benefit LGBTQ+, a live-in partner of a different sex will not be covered under it. If you say inclusive, you are covering same-sex partner, trans-gender partner and live-in partner (for someone who has chosen not to marry). This is one difference between an inclusive cover and an LGBTQ cover,” he said.