what YOU need to know before taking out private medical insurance

Here is a list of 14 important questions to ask when taking out private medical insurance.

Why so many questions?  Because you don't want to have been paying for 10 years, have cancer and then they tell you that oral medicine is not covered! or dialysis, or speech therapy!!!

These things are in the basic services in the NHS, and in my opinion they should be covered too, but when one goes to shop for insurance, we usually choose based on the marketing skills of the person we are talking to, and that is a mistake.

                                                            image courtesy of freedigitalsphoto.net by graur razvan ionut 

So, here it goes:

Very important questions to ask when taking out a private insurance (these are not in order of importance)

1 which companies have better reputation? This is very difficult to find out, because anecdotes do not constitute evidence. A study has been made by the investigative TV program “consumidores”, and they got to a rank .I will not post that rank here because I don’t completely agree in their methodology, but you can find it here

2 do they have good quality doctors? Usually here in the costa (and I think that would be all over spain, the doctors are the same. Here every insurance covers the main private hospitals.

3 do they offer assistance in another country?, this is a good plus.

4 does it cover out-of-hospital expensive medications, for example oncology in an outpatient basis? This is very very important, I have known many people that have insurance, and suddenly they are not covered for cancer, because the treatment comes in pills, mind you exorbitantly priced pills!!!!. I have seen many cases of this. Keep in mind that treatments are heading towards an out- patient basis. This is a very important question to ask.

5 what happens if my injury is because of a “dangerous” sport? is it covered?, there are many companies that EXCLUDE what they call dangerous sports, and that could be ski!

6 does it have a maximum that they are going to spend in one year? this is very important also. Medicine is very expensive

7 does it cover check-ups? Very important 

8 does it cover TAC, MRI, and PET scan? (The last one is VERY important for cancer)

9 does it let me pick my GP and specialist?

10 Do I have a co-pay?

11 Do they cover dental care or can I add it on for a small amount?

12 does it cover transplantation?

13 does it cover special procedures like dialysis?

14 does it cover screening? Video -colonoscopy, mammography, etc.?

Now, things to have in mind about the administrative side of things:

1 coverage: are they transparent about coverage?, or is it written in a vague language or even a impossible to understand legalese?

2 exclusions: what kind of things do they consider pre-existing conditions?

3 wait period: what are their wait periods, and what happens if something happens during those?

4 change of company or unsubscribe? Many companies do not let you get out of your policy for the full year that you have signed for, but they can “sack” you as a client if they want to.

There is a very good paper (in Spanish) where they did an in depth investigation of companies, you can access it here.

Before taking out private insurance, contact us and we'll go over some policies and do a recommendation on which could be the best for you.

image courtesy of freedigitalsphoto.net by cooldesgigns