Company Health Insurance
Corporate health insurance levels of cover

If you’re looking for corporate health insurance, you’ll probably be surprised by the sheer range of options today compared with even just a few years ago. An increasing number of businesses are recognising the advantages of running company-based health care and private health insurance providers are in fierce competition to secure your custom. Not only has this encouraged the wide diversification of products available, but made them cheaper too.

Is there a choice in the levels of cover?

Private medical insurance (PMI) is a huge field with very many options delivered by a wide range of insurance providers. As a result, therefore, corporate schemes are many and varied, offering a choice in the level of cover provided:

• health care packages – typically offer one of the most cost-effective arrangements, since the range of benefits is predetermined and this helps to keep down the cost to the insurer. Care needs to be taken at the initial stages of selecting a package, since no two are the same, and a “standard” package simply does not exist.

Amongst the various PMI packages available, companies might choose, for example, whether day-patient, out-patient and in-patient costs are covered, and consider whether additional benefits might be necessary (such as private nursing, ambulance charges, health screening and consultations and procedures carried out by a General Practitioner);

• “pick and mix” – corporate health insurance is designed to appeal to all manner of companies, from the small to the large, from start-ups to well established businesses, providing corporate health care for employees in all sorts of trades and professions.

By “picking and mixing” the most relevant areas of health insurance cover, companies are able to build what is effectively their own private health scheme by choose the elements of cover most suitable for their own employees;

• basic cover – as the name suggests, this level of corporate health insurance provides limited cover, with many of the additions and optional extras of other schemes already stripped away to provide genuinely affordable private medical care.

A common way of containing costs under such schemes is for participating members to continue to rely on the National Health Service where feasible, but claiming for private medical treatment when NHS waiting lists are longer than a typical six weeks;

• sharing the risk – in the same way as many other insurance policies, the company might opt to share some of the risk with the PMI insurer through the amount it pays in claims excesses. Raising the amount of excess shouldered of course reduces the level of premiums charged. It needs to be borne in mind, however, that an excess is payable each time an individual employee prompts a claim on the corporate health insurance policy. If the business is small and employs relatively few staff, therefore, the excess payable in any one year might prove disproportionate.

Typically, therefore, it tends to be larger businesses, with large numbers of staff, which share a significant proportion of the risks with the corporate health insurance provider in this way.