Employer private health insurance too taxing?

fantasyvn

Hi all

I joined this new employer not too long ago and am very happy with all the employment benefits here. With one exception which is the company's private health insurance which is costing me over £120 in tax and NI every month (I'm a higher rate payer). The payslip shows that the company pays for my family (hubby + me + 3yr old son) £300 a month in premiums which is a lot hence the tax I pay. The policy is with BUPA and it's very good but it includes things that we don't really need for example psychiatric treatment. We're in our early 30s and haven't got any major health issue. God forbid if things happen then we'd be happy to have costs covered but for now I'm thinking paying out £1500 a year for a family's private health insurance is a bit steep. While in fact we might not need that much as children's care at NHS is very good already. We're planning to have another baby but this policy of course never covers pregnancy and childbirth. So really do we need to keep this or should I opt out?

The other thing is the policy exclude pre-existing medical history so if I opt out now when I come back in as a new members all of my medical history will not be considered. Also I only started with this company and still not sure I will stay for long (everything's ok now but who knows if I need to move on at some point in time). My previous employer's private health insurance was also very good but I never used it and we had our baby while I was there which means all the complications related to his birth story were excluded in the new policy. So if we had another baby while I'm at this new company and if I had to move on then we'd have to start all over again which means the £1500 a year in tax we're paying now would be completely wasted.

I've been thinking of getting our own policy (one of my colleagues did this to get pregnancy covered) but not sure to what extent we should purchase for ourselves. We won't be able to pay £300 a month but would a policy that less than the tax we pay now be sufficient for a family like ours?

Many thanks for reading.

InsideInsurance

Complications of pregnancy normally is covered, normal pregnancy normally isnt.... I'd be interested to know which insurer your colleague went with that does give cover for routine pregnancy?

Your employee scheme seems exceptionally expensive! At a former employers we had the top tier Bupa on a non-underwriten basis so pre existing conditions were covered and no excess. For the wife and I the value was £1,225 a year. Obviously adding kids would have upped it but not close to £3k!

fantasyvn

Thanks Inside! Great input! I'll let HR know that they're paying way off the average. Would it be related to the average age in the company which is rather high and the fact that a couple of colleagues have been having cancer treatment?? Would it then be unfair for us then to join and pay for the group?
Not sure which insurer the other colleague went for cover of routine pregnancy but she had a couple of private check-ups and delivered at Great Portland Street!

InsideInsurance

With my ex employer I'd guess they had circa 900 people in the scheme with an average age range of late 20s to mid 40s. Evidently some older employees but generally a fairly young employee base though missing the school leavers element (they outsourced the volume/ junior jobs other than filing clerks)

The pricing is based on volume and claims experience (plus some other factors). With 900 employees and the scheme having been running for at least 15 years with Bupa there will inevitably have been some big claims made there but as office based roles it should have been fairly average -v- heavy industry where you may expect higher frequencies of certain significant issues.

When I left them I went back to operating my own company and tried to get the same level of cover. Bupa originally declined to cover our pre-existing conditions but speaking to their business sales team they offered the same policy that I had had but it was going to be massively more expensive. Thankfully after getting that part of the business to agree to it I went back to the personal lines and they changed their minds and we bought it directly rather than via my company but it did prove they were getting a very good discount from the shelf price but then the volume of employees will have helped normalise the expected claims


Would be interested to know their insurer, just in case