Insurance Blog

Thursday, August 20, 2009

There's a lot more to Health Insurance than just Medical Costs!

So what's left for the IFA's to sell us then?

Mortgages - only if you've got 30% to put down!

Life Insurance - people are only looking to downsize covers!

Loans? You'll be lucky!

PPI a product that should be selling well during the current economic times, is dead in the water due to bad publicity and PPI Claims farmers.

Health Insurance?

Hmm Maybe?

Health Insurance is in the limelight at the moment thanks to a bunch of redneck yanks using the NHS as an example of everything that is wrong with the State interfering with healthcare.
However, like it or not we will soon see a swing to the right in UK Government and with this will inevitably come cutbacks in State funded healthcare.
Many savvy Health Insurance compamies are well aware of this window of opportunity for selling 'new' health insurance products - expect to see ads on the TV very soon!

However as pointed out in a recent ezine article there is a lot more to wholistic personal insurance protection than just medical expenses cover.....

Five Ways to Protect Your Health and Wealth With Insurance Against Sickness

If you are unfortunate enough to suffer an illness, sickness or an accident at any time in your life, the consequences can be far reaching and affect your lifestyle and family for perhaps months or years into the future. Primarily you will require immediate treatment and care for the accident or illness. You will also need to consider how to meet your financial commitments during a period of hospitalisation and recovery. Furthermore it is wise to be recompensed for the unfortunate loss of bodily functions or if your contract a chronic or life critical illness.

Five ways to protect yourself and your family against sickness with Insurance:

1. Protect your personal health with Private Medical Insurance

Medical or Health Insurance is often called Private Health Insurance, Private Medical Insurance or PMI in the UK. This type of cover provides quicker access to specialist consultants, hospital treatment and rehabilitation services, and is designed to cover the costs of and arrange remedies for treatable short term or acute accident or sickness. It is however often restricted to hospitals owned by the particular insurance group. PMI is primarily bought to receive quicker treatment in nicer surroundings than is offered by the state system. Many policies allow you to top up cover should you require additional treatment. Levels of indemnity or cover limits are quite often determined by the price you pay as a premium. Policies are often sold with varying levels of cover under banners such as Silver, Gold and Platinum cover, and covers are extendable to other members of the immediate family.

Many UK employers provide what is known as Group Health Insurance plans as health care and medical cover for their employees, however this practice has declined since this became a taxable benefit. It is important to note that nearly all of these types of medical insurance policies exclude pre-existing conditions and are designed for treatable conditions only.

2. Protect your body with Personal Accident Insurance Cover

Personal Accident Insurance or PAI as it is known covers the loss of various body parts and pays out a lump sum designed to help ease your immediate suffering. Each limb or organ is priced and if you are unfortunate enough to lose for example an eye, you will receive the commensurate agreed benefit amount for the loss of the eye. Many policies also pay out a lump sum on death.

3. Protect your lifestyle and wealth with Personal Accident and Sickness Insurance

Often known as ASU, these products provide a lump sum of money each month if you are unfortunate enough to have an accident or be sick, whether hospitalised or not, allowing various expenses and costs of your life style to be protected while you are ill and recovering. These include income protection for your earnings, mortgage and loan protection for your debts and monthly outgoings and the more encompassing lifestyle insurance to protect all your finances, when you are sick. These type of policies pay out an agreed monthly benefit commensurate with the amount of cover required.

4. Protect your future with Critical Illness Insurance

Basic medical insurance is designed to cover short term illness only. Critical Illness or dreaded disease polices are a recent innovation in the UK Health Insurance market, having originated in South Africa. You are covered under this type of policy if you are struck by one of a number of specified diseases, many of which are terminal and for that reason critical illness insurance is often sold as a bolt on cover with a life insurance policy. Examples of the types of critical illness covered are Cancer, Heart Disease, Strokes, Parkinson's, and Multiple Sclerosis, to name but a few.In the event of a claim, as with personal accident and sickness cover, you will receive a lump sum to help with the costs of the illness. When sold as part of a life policy the lump sum payable on death is often reduced if there has been an earlier critical illness claim.

5. Protect your family with a hospital bed with Health Cash plans

Health cash plans where you make regular payments into a specific medical fund which entitles you to claim if the need occurs. These cash plans have been available for some time in the UK and have been particularly popular in the areas of optometry and dentistry which are mainly privately funded outside of the NHS. Recent innovative more affordable health insurance hospital cash plans are becoming very popular, mainly because they allow access to all the hospital services that are available under a standard medical insurance policy except that you are not tied to one hospital provider of medical supplier to provide that service.

As with all Insurance products it is now very straightforward to shop around and compare prices on the Internet. Each individual will have varying cover needs and it is important to compare insurance covers as well as premium prices. It is very important with all health and personal protection insurance policies to read the small print and online documents to be sure that you understand the exclusions to each particular health care coverage.

For more information and advice on all aspects of medical insurance visit UK Health Insurance. Compare health insurance quotes and various plans online.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Healey

Labels: Financial Advisors, health care, health insurance, health insurance quotes, IFAs, income protection, NHS, Personal Accident, Private Medical Insurance, UK health Insurance

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

UK Health Insurance- From the Cradle to the Queue

Health and Wealth! Isn't that what eveyone drinks to?
A look at UK Health Insurance and National Wealth.

Britain was still reeling from World War Two when the National Health Service was launched in 1948, sweeping in an era of social change and expectation.
Gone were the days of ‘bring out your dead’ if you couldn’t afford to pay.
Despite many changes over the sixty one years and its recent flirtations with Private Health Insurance companies, the so called postcode lottery system and other structural difficulties, the NHS has remained true to the ethos of access for all.
No system is perfect and spatial differences in levels of access and quality of care still need to be radically addressed.

In the UK when the National Health Service was finally implemented in 1948 as part of Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee's 'cradle to the grave' welfare state.
A nationwide system of free healthcare was finally launched by Aneurin Bevan the then Minister of Health, which promised us access to health care cover and treatment for all.
The cradle to the grave speech mentality had set the standards for social healthcare and access to treatment for all.
To date, despite its recent structural changes, and despite the healthy criticism and debate that the subject of the NHS always brings, if you look at the system in performance and social cohesion you have to say that it appears to work much better as a form of national health insurance than do comparative systems in so called developed countries. This development in healthcare is always a subject of great debate in the lead up to a General Election, and no doubt will take greater stage in the months to come

Everyone working in the UK has to pay National Insurance contributions as part of their income in order for the system to work, and facilitating everyone in the UK with medical cover.
However National Insurance contributions are not a good solution for a number of reasons.
They increase the costs of labour.
By definition this makes them inflationary.
The costs of production are passed onto the populace en masse
The contributions are by no means equitable
Many sections of the population are able to virtually opt out of the contribution system
The NHS is heavily subsided by the tax contributions of the healthy and wealthy forty percent plus payers.

Whether the United States Government is able to take what could be seen as a major left shift to achieve better social cohesion and consequently improved GDP, remains to be seen.
Are the workers prepared to subsidize the shirkers and the misfortunate? There needs to exist a situation both economically, socially and mentality, of desperation and hope that existed in the UK in 1945, in order to see a fiscal response to the current situation, biting the healthcare bullet that the USA is so afraid to bite. Providing the ultimate National Safety Net!

The States is in the difficult situation of how to deal with chronic sickness, the recession, the role of PMI as an underwriter of GDP and the political influence and lobbying power of the large Health Insurance companies. Rather you than me Barrack!

Gordon Brown should note that Private Health Insurance became one of the first things people were encouraged to buy when her who’s name shall not be spoken came to power in 1979.

Labels: Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, health insurance, health insurance quotes, medical insurance, NHS, PMI, private health insurance, Private Medical Insurance, UK government

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Health Insurance as a complimentary contingency

Should we really have to think about health insurance?

Why do we need it?

Whatever happened to 'the cradle to the grave'?

From what we read about the state of British hospitals you may be better off with a good legal expenses policy with extra medical negligence cover, or perhaps some sort of lifestyle insurance cover that allows you to recuperate on a desert island far from MRSA and C-difficile infected wards.

Insurance Blogger did need some major surgery last year and although the treatment I got in an NHS hospital was as good as anywhere else I had to wait.........

Not good if your complaint is life or lifestyle threatening and time is of the utmost importance.....

So Health Insurance is a must for anyone who can afford it. Check out the pros and cons and compare a selection of the best UK Health Insurance Quotes at http://www.healthinsurancequotes.org.uk.

Labels: health insurance, health insurance quotes, medical insurance, private health insurance