With businesses tightening their belts and redundancies becoming widespread, private medical cover may seem like one expense that cannot be justified.
HealthFund, however, is urging businesses to look at how they can cut the cost of insurance, not the quality of the cover they receive.
HealthFund is a unique concept in healthcare, for businesses and individuals. With traditional private medical insurance, the money paid in premiums is kept by the insurer, whether a claim is made or not.
With HealthFund, money is paid into a fund, this remains the property of the business and can be withdrawn at any time.
The fund is used to pay for minor, inexpensive treatments, whilst expensive treatments are covered by a comprehensive health insurance policy. This allows the premiums to be set at a vastly reduced rate.
If the scheme members rarely claim, or use the NHS, the company benefits from the savings not the insurer.
In a test of randomly chosen company healthcare schemes supplied by a leading UK Healthcare Intermediary, the average cost of HealthFund’s £1,500 option, (where employers contribute the first £1500 towards the cost of a claim) was just 46% of the companies’ current premiums – less than half of the cost they are being charged by their current insurers.
Andy Dean, chief executive of HealthFund says:
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‘The cost of providing health insurance is often a long-term commitment for many businesses and they need to look at the lifetime cost of policies, which can be huge. Being tied in to a product with spiralling costs way ahead of real-world inflation is not attractive to many business owners and executives, and providing private health insurance for staff has become prohibitive for many companies.
“However, top-quality cover does not have to be expensive, with our proposition members can make huge savings, at a time when it is incredibly important for businesses to hold on to their cash.’
