You may be aware of a no-claims discount (NCD) if you have a home or car insurance policy. Did you know that some Health Insurers also offer a NCD system?
Some Private Medical Insurers use a NCD structure to count the number of years in which a claim hasn’t been made. This is done to help reduce costs in the long term. Discounts vary from one insurance company to another.
With this in mind we are letting you know more about the NCD in Private Medical Insurance.
No Claims Discounts and how they affect your Private Medical Insurance
Insurers that incorporate No Claims Discounts usually display this via a scaling system. This is provided to show clearly the levels available and the discounts applied to each level.
If you are new to health insurance and buy a policy which incorporates a NCD, your premium will have a high level of discount applied to the base premium. This means you will be on one of the top levels of that insurers scale.
Your certificate will show the NCD and what percentage of discount has been applied to your premium.
For each year you are insured without making a claim, you will earn another years NCD. Therefore you will move up a level on the insurer’s scale, until reaching their maximum NCD level. However, if you do make a claim then this will have an impact on your NCD. This will affect the renewal premium you have offered. It is worth bearing in mind that individual insurers apply different rules regarding the number of levels dropped when a claim is made.
Some insurers have a ‘per policy’ No Claims Discount, others are ‘per person’. If you have a ‘per person’ No Claims Discount, claims from one family member will only affect their individual no-claims discount, not all the members insured.
Not all claims will affect your No Claims Discount. There are exceptions depending on what the claim is for or how it is made.
Should you Protected your No Claims Discount
You can choose to protect your NCD for an additional premium. This means that if you need to make a claim on your health insurance policy your NCD remains at the same level, ensuring the discount applied on premium prior to your claim being made applies to your premium at renewal. This does not protect the overall price of your insurance policy, as health insurance increases for a number of reasons.
Are NCD’s available for all Individual Health Insurance policies?
Some Private Medical Insurers do not use no-claims discounts, as they feel that consumers are penalised for making a claim because it eventually pushes up their premiums so high that people avoid making further claims simply to preserve their policy discount.
If you would like to know more about us and how you could benefit from a No Claims Discount policy we can help.
Please contact us on 01245 929 129 or email us with your queries at enquires@smphealthcare.com. We look forward to hearing from you.