Swine Flu in Private Health Care

All the major medical insurance companies are providing information online about Swine Flu and how it should be dealt with. As reported in Health Insurance News UK, normally any complications of swine flu would be handled as emergencies in NHS hospitals and emergency treatment is not covered under insurance policies. Up until recently there has been little diect information available from health insurance companies about how Swine Flu is likely to affect their customers.

As reported a Bupa spokesperson said,

'We don’t cover emergencies. Treatment would be down to the NHS.'

Recently on the Aviva website they wrote:

'Aviva would like to assure you that our health insurance plans do not specifically exclude pandemic diseases. Swine flu is therefore covered under our plans, subject to policy terms and conditions. However, like most health insurers, we do not cover for quarantines.'

Unlike the NHS there are not many statistics that come from the private health sector so we do not know how many cases of Swine Flu have been treated within this sector.

UK schools have broken up for the summer which could slow down the spread of Swine Flu. Conversely the risk of international spread of the virus is likely to increase as British families set off for the holidays abroad. The Association of British Insurers, (ABTA) have said that travellers should be covered against swine flu by health or travel insurance, as long as they did not have the virus when they took out their policy.

It will be interesting to see how private health insurance companies react to the Swine Flu pandemic in coming months and the numbers of cases they will have to deal with from people with health insurance who have developed complications as a result of swine flu but are no longer in need of emergency care.