Private health insurance with rewards for healthy living

What is health insurance?

Private medical insurance (PMI) gives you quick access to private facilities and treatments. It helps pay for any high, unexpected private medical bills you may need covered. This could be anything from physiotherapy sessions, to major heart surgery. PMI also plays an important role in funding the early diagnosis of critical conditions.

What does health insurance cover?

Private medical insurance is designed to cover the cost of private medical treatment for acute conditions. An acute condition is a disease, illness or injury that is likely to respond quickly to treatment and return someone to the state of health they were in before, or lead to a full recovery.

It doesn’t usually cover treatment of long-term (chronic) conditions, where the main aim is to keep the symptoms under control. Private medical insurance also won’t cover any pre-existing conditions that you may have when taking out a plan.

How does private medical insurance work?

For the majority of claims, medical treatment begins with a GP referral for specialist treatment. This can either be your NHS GP or a private GP. Any onward treatment is managed by working closely with your private medical insurer, to ensure that you have quick and easy access to the right medical treatment.

How is private medical insurance different from the NHS?

Private medical insurance is designed to work alongside all the services offered by the NHS, but focuses on providing quicker access to treatment for acute medical conditions. PMI members can still use all services offered by the NHS. But with pressures on the NHS to meet healthcare demands growing rapidly, compounded by increasingly stretched resources, PMI can play a complementary role.