Company Health Insurance
Guide to self employed health insurance

If you’re self employed, you enjoy the freedom of being your own boss. By the same token, however, with that freedom comes a responsibility – if you don’t work, you have no income. Staying healthy and reducing time off work through the inevitable bouts of illness, therefore, is important to your very livelihood. Self employed health insurance may be an effective way of ensuring that medical issues are dealt with promptly and that you return to work as quickly as possible.

With private medical insurance (PMI) a boon to your self employed business, and not just a self-indulgent luxury, what are the principal benefits and what are some of the features to look out for when choosing your insurer?

The benefits

• the National Health Service is characterised by waiting – waiting for an appointment, waiting for the doctor, waiting for treatment, waiting for hospital admission and so on. With your own private health care plan, you can typically choose when and where to get any treatment you might need;
• any questions you might have about when and where you are likely to be seen most promptly and most effectively are often just a telephone call away on the PMI insurer’s help line;
• prevention, of course, is often much better than the cure. Health insurance companies are increasingly aware of this and many offer a range of preventive medical facilities and services, often at a discounted cost.

Tailored to your needs

Safeguarding your health is a personal matter, of course, and few individuals have identical requirements. Most self employed health insurance schemes recognise this need for flexibility by allowing individuals to tailor the PMI cover to suit their particular needs and circumstances. When searching for the private health care plan that best suits you, therefore, you might want to consider:

• level of cover – the range of private health insurance plans allows a choice not just on the risks covered but those that suit your pocket, too. Limited cover, for example, restricts the number of illnesses and conditions. Alternatively, you might want to share the risks with the insurer by continuing to use National Health Service facilities when waiting times are acceptable;
• packages – are available which let you pick and mix specific PMI health care services and facilities according to those that appear to suit your needs, work and life style the best;
• additions – self employed health insurance is also a natural companion to several other types of insurance that might help safeguard both you and your business. For example, these might include health cash benefits, critical illness insurance, income protection insurance, dental insurance and even travel insurance.