‘Bayanihan’ comes alive through insurance
Alexander Grenz, president and CEO of Allianz PNB Life
There’s health insurance that gives you that much-needed peace of mind—and there’s insurance that enables you to share that peace with others. The latter is what one of the Philippines’ major life insurers is offering its clients as part of a new social responsibility project that aims to “promote the importance of inclusivity in insurance.”
Established by Allianz PNB Life, the initiative is called Allianz Kaagapay (the Filipino term for a helpful companion), and its goal is to provide health insurance to the country’s underserved rural communities. To do so, Allianz partnered with Reach52, a social enterprise that provides screening, health workers’ training, affordable medicine, insurance, diagnostics and consumer health products in rural areas that are usually unable to access such services.
“Most of those who do not have insurance are from the most vulnerable areas of the country. Through our partnership with Reach52, we aim to provide these communities the protection they need during these challenging times,” Allianz PNB Life president and CEO Alexander Grenz says.
Allianz PNB Life’s customers will also play a role in this program, because through Kaagapay, members of Reach52 beneficiary communities will receive P25,000 worth of life insurance—including COVID-19 coverage—for every purchase of Allianz Well! made until Dec. 20.
Allianz Well! is Allianz PNB Life’s health insurance product that has an annual plan limit of up to P100 million, which covers COVID-19 hospitalization and intensive care unit expenses up to the plan limit. Reach52 operates their on-the-ground services for over 500 communities in the Philippines, Cambodia and India, with additional countries in the pipeline, and have partnerships with over 20 leading global and regional organizations.
According to Edward Booty, founder and CEO of Reach 52, the organization’s members from Pototan and Cuartero, Iloilo, will be the first beneficiaries of the insurance package, because these have been some of their most active communities since the social enterprise was established in 2016.
Reach52 members mainly come from the lower-income C and D brackets, explains Booty. Working closely with local government units, Reach52 provides access to universal health care by training barangay health workers and “access managers” in the community, who are tasked with going door-to-door to enroll people in the enterprise’s services, by collecting information on their health and well-being needs.
Reach52 is named as such because it seeks to help those that have no access to affordable health care across the globe—which is 52 percent of the world’s population, or over three billion people, according to the social enterprise.
“Our access managers are the ones who help us fill the gap in the health care system in remote rural communities. We thank Allianz PNB Life for providing this support to our members,” says Booty.
