|
|
 |
The APRIL Medibroker Service
APRIL Medibroker is a fully independent international medical insurance intermediary and broker offering a worldwide free quotation service across the Internet. We offer affordable health and medical insurance plans by arranging terms of business and agencies with many of the major medical and health insurers in the UK, Europe and the USA.
This gives us access to over 200 healthcare insurance products we can offer to address your needs. We regularly research both the market and insurance premiums to ensure you get best advice from our medical insurance consultants.
When living abroad, you may not have any of the healthcare rights of the local national population. You need to ask:
|
Our consultants will respond to your requests and answer health insurance enquiries via email. We provide a snapshot of the health insurance market once we receive your request for quotation.
We check the service standards of all health insurers we work with by measuring how quickly they deal with claims and medical emergencies around the world. We show health insurance benefits on an "apples to apples" basis so that you may make an informed selection of medical insurer. We always ensure that you can compare 'company' to 'company'.
Our links page offers information on relocation, international schools and housing as well as other globally based expatriate sites. We cater for the global citizen, irrespective of location or nationality.
We can deal with individuals, families, groups or small companies worldwide, in most countries around the world.
Premium Increases Explained
It is very important to note that, with most international health insurance plans, your premium is very likely to increase at each annual renewal. There are a number of reasons that could cause this increase, and below you will find helpful explanations of each.
1) Increasing Age
Most expatriate medical insurance plans are "age related". What this means is that as you get older your premiums will increase. Insurers, plan providers and underwriters see a perceived risk with regards to age - the older you are, the more likely you are to experience medical problems.
Policy pricing tends to operate on one of two age related pricing structures - either premiums are rated on a "year by year" basis whereby each year there will be an age related premium increase or on an "age banding" basis where there are four to five year age bands and a premium increase will apply as you "step up" an age band.
Under the "year by year" basis, premiums tend to increase on a less dramatic level than entering a new age bracket on an "age banding" policy. The other side of the coin is that on an age-banded policy you would only experience an age related increase once every four to five years (however it is worth noting that this increase may occur at your first renewal, depending on your age - but it will be a number of years before it happens again).
When you take out a policy through April Medibroker you will receive the current premium rates for all of the plans quoted to you. Whilst these will not give an accurate premium for the years to come they will give you an idea of the premium increases that you could incur in the future. What also needs to be remembered is that, even where no age related premium increase applies, there almost certainly will be an increase due to Medical Inflation (see below).
2) Medical Inflation
International trends in medical inflation show that the rate of inflation for health care averages between 10-20% per year. Double-digit medical inflation increases are predicted for the next decade. This is a growing trend reflected in the provision of international and expatriate health insurance.
The following items contribute to the increases in health care costs:
- Prescription Drugs. This expense is projected to grow rapidly over the next few years.
- The development of new advances in treatment and diagnostics procedures are costly.
- Research shows that new technologies and treatments mean people visit medical facilities more frequently - this leads to more international medical insurance claims for payment by insurers/plan providers.
What is worth remembering with any of the plans that April Medibroker advise upon is that your own individual claims do not affect your premiums. Inflationary increases are calculated across all customers of that particular insurer. This can be a double edged sword, however, especially if you are fortunate enough to have never needed to claim!
3) No Claims Discounts
Under certain circumstances, and with an ever decreasing number of insurers, customers may have been eligible for a "No Claims Discount" under their plan. Should a claim be made under this policy, the likelihood is that this discount will no longer apply from renewal and a sizeable premium increase could result. When you take out a plan that includes this it may be worth couples or families considering individual plans rather than one - it may be that the discount applies per person, not per policy - one claim could potentially affect the overall premium for all as opposed to just the premium for the individual making the claim.
Andrew Wilson
CEO
APRIL Medibroker Limited
20th August 2009
At April Medibroker our Sales and Client Services teams are here all year round to help our customers with questions, problems and the administration of policies. If you are concerned about current or future premium increases please contact us and we can explain increases and also look at ways of reducing your premiums.