Your employer's health cover ends the day you leave

Group cover from an employer is the most common health insurance in India and the most commonly misunderstood. It feels like a solved problem, right up to the week it is not.

It ends when the employment ends. It does not follow you to the next job. It does not cover the gap between jobs. And if you are laid off rather than resigning, it ends at precisely the moment your income does.

The part that actually hurts

Losing the cover is the obvious problem. The expensive problem is losing the time.

Health policies make you wait before pre-existing conditions and a named list of procedures are covered — commonly three years for pre-existing disease and two for the specific list. Those years are the real asset in a health policy. A policy you have held for four years is worth substantially more than an identical one bought today, because the waiting is done.

Buy a fresh individual policy at 38, after a decade on group cover, and you start those clocks from zero — at an age when you are more likely to have something declarable, and at a higher premium than the same policy would have cost at 28.

Migration is the mechanism most people miss

Migration is the right to move from a group policy to an individual one with the same insurer, keeping the waiting-period credit you have accrued. It is not the same as portability, which moves you between insurers at renewal.

The practical consequence: if your employer’s group policy is with an insurer whose retail products are decent, migrating can carry years of served waiting periods into a policy that is yours. If you simply let the group cover lapse and buy elsewhere later, that credit is gone.

Migration has timing rules and has to be initiated around the point cover ends, not months afterwards. Ask HR who the group insurer is and what the migration process is before you resign, not after your last day.

What to do, in order

1. Buy your own policy while you are still employed and still covered. Underwriting is easier while you are healthy and in work, and the waiting periods start running immediately — ideally years before you need them.
2. Do not treat group cover as your only cover. Treat it as a top-up over your own policy. Two layers is not waste; it is what stops a job change from becoming an insurance gap.
3. Ask about migration at the group insurer, in writing, before your notice period ends.
4. Cover the gap deliberately if you are between jobs. A break in policy resets waiting periods and lets the insurer re-underwrite you at your current age and health.
5. Check what the group policy actually covered. Many include maternity and pre-existing conditions from day one — benefits an individual policy will make you wait for. Knowing which benefits you are about to lose tells you what to prioritise in the replacement.

If you have already left

You have not lost everything, but move quickly.

If it has been days rather than months, contact the group insurer about migration anyway — the answer is sometimes yes. If that door is closed, buy an individual policy now rather than after the next job starts: every month without cover is a month the waiting-period clock is not running, and a month in which anything newly diagnosed becomes a pre-existing condition on the next proposal form.

The worst version of this is waiting until you feel unwell to start looking. By then the thing you are worried about is exactly the thing that will be excluded.

The mechanism is worth reading in full: migration, portability and what a break in policy costs you.