There is a phone call that many NRIs dread more than any other. Not the one about a job, or a visa, or a market correction. The one that comes late at night, from a sibling or a neighbour, saying that a parent has been taken to hospital. What follows that call is not just grief or worry. It is a rapid, disorienting scramble to book a flight, to reach someone at the hospital, and somewhere in all of it, to figure out whether there is insurance, whether the hospital accepts it, and whether anyone on the ground actually knows how to use it.
For a growing number of NRIs, this scramble is prompting a quiet but significant shift: a hard look at whether the health coverage their parents have, if they have any at all, is genuinely adequate for the medical realities of aging in India today.
