Health Insurance

One of the most common insurance products is health insurance, a broad umbrella category that covers any sort of insurance product that helps an individual mitigate against the expenses that are occurred when it comes to medical treatment.

Health insurance products work by estimating the typical probability of an individual needing health care treatment and then what those costs are likely to be based on a huge range of factors (such as age, any existing health problems and lifestyle).

Sometimes individuals take out health insurance policies themselves with a private companies, whilst for many workers one of the benefits will be being signed up to a healthcare provider that the company works with: this might be at a discount cost or even free as a benefit of working for the company.

There are various important terms to understand with insurance products such as this. One of these is the concept of a premium, which basically refers to the cost of the health insurance policy taken out by the individual.

Another key term is known as the deductible, and this refers to simply how much a person has to pay before the insurance company will cover additional costs: for instance the first $500 of any treatment may be needed to be paid by the policyholder with any excess over that paid by the insurance company. The term exclusions is easier to understand: this refers to types of health issue that are not covered, and so if these occur the individual would need to pay themselves as they are excluded by the policy that they have.

In the UK healthcare is provided free by the NHS, but there are also various companies that offer private healthcare insurance, and typically people will join these through work if they work for a sufficiently large company (smaller businesses are less likely to offer healthcare benefits as a general rule). It is estimated that under 8% of the population in the UK is a member of a private healthcare scheme.

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