Health insurance questions

[JustAFewQuestions]

Hi,

Trying to understand how health insurance works and if there is any benefit to having a personal cover (for which we would pay ourselves) on top of a medical cover through work.

I am happy with the cover I have through my work place, however, I wonder what happens once I leave my job. I suppose the cover will stop and there will be a 3 month window in which I can pick up the cover cost myself or have the terms transferred to the new employer.

Now, as we are not that young anymore, would it make more sense to have a personal cover on which to fall back in case that I lose my job? We are not well off and it would have an impact on our family budget to have separate private covers so if there is no real benefit, I wouldn’t purchase personally.

And there are more questions – if I need to claim, I suppose it would be smart to use the workplace cover or will my personal premium also go up at renewal?

My husband has been dismissed at work recently and he had a good cover for all of us. The dismissal happened without much notice and apart from the shock we had when we found out it made me wonder, what if any of us were receiving any treatment under that cover, what would have happened, because the medical was stopped on the day basically.

Thank you.

We evaluated options for our son when he started working. The workplace cover was very expensive as it was a fixed monthly amount for all staff, regardless of age etc. As son is only 21, he could get a better private insurance package for a lot less money, so that's what he's done. Plan is for him to opt into his employer's scheme once he's older (if he's still there) as no doubt his private policy will start to hike premiums as he gets older, whereas his work's scheme is fixed regardless of age. In the meantime, if he changes employer, then at least he can just continue paying into his existing private policy for continuity etc until he settles somewhere.

There’s no advantage to having an additional personal policy. If you have to transfer your cover to a new personal policy because you’ve left a job, you usually get offered terms that are quite similar- it’s obviously a very common scenario and they don’t want to lose customers that way.

Bump?