Health Cover Survey

According to Deloitte's 2010 Survey of Health Care Consumers only a quarter of respondents said they felt they had enough health cover: four out of five said they were only 'adequately insured.'

The Deloitte survey looked at 1,000 British adults in order to find out consumer attitudes about both private and NHS medical treatment. Over a third of respondents said that they had cash plan cover but despite people's dissatisfaction with the amount of cover they had only 2% had switched private health insurance plans. 58% of those who had changed plan did so to get better value for money.

One of the biggest complaints about medical insurance was the fact that 'experimental' treatments were not covered. Experimental treatments refer to those that do not yet have enough data behind them to certify them as conclusively effective. PruHealth, for example, do cover experimental treatments as part of their plans. This is unusual however. 69% of respondents said that they would be prepared to try experimental treatments.

The findings seem to support the health insurance market's move towards illness prevention. Over half of respondents said they had a 'strong interest' in taking part in wellness programmes and 49% said they would take part in healthy living programmes if they could get reduced private medical insurance.

NHS
The NHS didn't fair too badly in the Deloitte survey. 67% of respondents said that they were 'happy' with the NHS. 50% said that it was 'average', a fifth said that it was 'failing' but only 2% said that it was excellent. The most dissatisfaction concerned waiting times which 46% of respondents felt was 'poor' and the amount of accessible information about doctor's performance where 42% felt that it was poor.