Private Medical Cover!

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Tips for buying private medical cover

How to make sure you get the most out of your private medical insurance.

Understand the basics

Before you decide whether a modular product is for you, it helps to get a handle on comprehensive medical cover and what it means. This cover is expensive, but covers a wide variety of conditions.

A comprehensive policy should pay for a private consultation, diagnostic tests (such as X-rays and blood tests) and treatment and surgery in a private hospital. It should also pay for related outpatient treatment, if needed. Comprehensive insurance also has extra "hotel benefits" – for example, a private room in hospital. But private medical insurance won't pay for emergency treatment, although follow-up treatment may be done privately. Likewise, policies won't pay for "chronic" ongoing conditions, such as asthma or multiple sclerosis, nor will they cover routine medical care needed during pregnancy, childbirth or infertility treatment. Terminal conditions, cosmetic surgery and any previous conditions will also not be covered.

What is important to you?

To cut the cost of medical cover, ask yourself why you want it. If you are worried about waiting lists for routine operations, choose a policy that will allow you to jump the NHS queue. But if it is long-term expensive therapies for cancer that you think may be denied under the NHS, then you will need something more open-ended.

Raise the excess

One way of making medical cover cheaper is to pay a higher excess. Most insurers will require a £50 payment, but those opting for a higher excess can reduce costs significantly.

Consider self pay

Growing numbers of people are opting to pay for their own treatment for one-off problems. Around 250,000 people use this "self-pay" option each year. The cost of many routine operations can be less than paying premiums for 10 years. A knee replacement, for example, should cost about £4,000, while even a heart bypass usually costs less than £15,000. Of course, this isn't an option for long-term cancer treatment or other ongoing problems.

Take the six-week option Many health insurance companies offer a six-week option, but will only pay out if you have to wait more than six weeks for treatment on the NHS. This can cut premiums by up to a third.

SOURCE: Tips for buying private medical cover - Telegraph

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Re: Private Medical Cover!

Britain’s healthcare companies look as sick as their patients

An OFT inquiry into price fixing is adding to the problems of private healthcare companies, writes Helia Ebrahimi.

Faced with an ageing population and ever increasing costs topping £1.1 trillion a year, the case for radical surgery to Britain's healthcare industry is overwhelming. But for a myriad of political, financial and social reasons, the most obvious “extreme remedy” – greater involvement of the private sector – is proving anything but a cure-all. In what is being billed by its critics as the most radical overhaul of the National Health Service since its inception, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is attempting a tricky operation, trying to cut £20bn a year from the NHS’s £78bn budget by 2014-15. In theory, the reforms should signal a bigger role for the private sector, responsible for just £13.5bn of UK healthcare. But there is one problem: the financial health of Britain’s leading private practitioners.

Crippled by onerous property leases, ballooning debts and plummeting fees, Britain’s largest independent healthcare companies look as sick as their patients.Step forward General Healthcare Group (GHG) – the UK’s biggest private hospital operator, with 81 hospitals and 28pc of the market.....Read more here---: Britains healthcare companies look as sick as their patients - Telegraph